


you are part of a machine (you are not a human being)

by shuofthewind



Series: The Trick to Binary Stars [3]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Awesome Pepper Potts, Bechdel Test Pass, Canon-Typical Violence, Everyone Is Wearing Their Sassypants, Feminist Themes, Friends to Lovers, Maria Hill Feels, Multi, Nobody Is A Mature Adult, Not Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie) Compliant, POV Alternating, Serious Emotional Constipation, Slow Build, Slow Burn, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Unresolved Romantic Tension, Unresolved Sexual Tension, everyone is bad at feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-09
Updated: 2015-09-09
Packaged: 2018-04-19 22:03:53
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 27,132
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4762685
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shuofthewind/pseuds/shuofthewind
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve Rogers goes into the ice with two soulmarks, and he emerges with three. Maria Hill is born with two soulmarks, and wants neither of them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you are part of a machine (you are not a human being)

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [write love on my skin](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1835587) by [amusewithaview](https://archiveofourown.org/users/amusewithaview/pseuds/amusewithaview). 



> The only thing Bruce does in this fic is stand around looking confused and I have no regrets about it.
> 
> Unbeta'ed and dear god I am not reading through this again for a week so if there are any typos, just...ignore them. Please.
> 
> This monstrosity kept me from writing ANYTHING else, so now that it's up I should be able to update other things. Namely, _Operation Cupcake_ and _The Making of Monsters_ things.
> 
> Title is from "Gasoline" by Halsey, which has _ruined me_ as a human being.
> 
> In this 'verse, you are marked with the first words your soulmate will say to you. Silver is for romantic soulmates, gold for platonic. When the bond is forged (through touch, speech, and emotional acceptance) you gain a bond, which can manifest as anything from locational abilities (knowing where your soulmate is at all times) to empathic sharing to sense sharing.
> 
> Triggers for: death by cancer, violence, murder (thanks, Rumlow), allusions to sexism in the military, homophobic slurs, familial strife (black sheep syndrome), intra-family violence (sibling fist fight), allusions to brainwashing and psychological torture, allusions to forced captivity and mistreatment, imbibing of alcohol, mentions of PTSD, and SOMEONE'S COMPLETE INABILITY TO FUNCTION WITHIN THE RANGE OF NORMAL HUMAN EMOTION.

Steve Rogers goes into the ice with two soulmarks, and he emerges with three.

The first one isn’t at all difficult to understand. _Jesus, you like getting the crap beat out of you, don’t you?_ Granted, it’s not exactly the kind of language he expects from a seven-year-old—he’s only seven when Bucky finds him, Bucky nearly eight—but it fits his life and his circumstances. Have a smart mouth and a streak of bulldog stubbornness, and you don’t get much else other than the crap beat out of you.

The second one makes sense too. _Did you have something against running away?_ Second verse, same as the first. At first it bothers him that they’re both romantic silver, but then he meets them, both of them, Bucky and Peggy, Peggy and Bucky, and it makes _sense_. It makes sense the way little else about his life makes sense, especially after the War starts. Of course they’re both silver. Of course they’re both _his_ silvers. They could never be anything else.

(That’s something the world has lost in the ensuing decades, he finds. People used to call their soul mates their silver, their gold. Now it’s _romantic_ and _platonic_ and he gets it, he does, because everyone needs a definition, everyone needs a community, but it’s one of the few “old-timey thingamajigs” he persists with. _Silvers_ and _golds_ sounds more like fate. _Romantics_ and _platonics_ —it’s too scientific.)

(It still hurts to say it, after Bucky falls, and the silver gets tarnished. Never faded, never black—never quite dimmed—but so tarnished that for a long time, he doesn’t know the difference between the two.)

He goes into the ice with two silver soulmarks, one tarnished and dark at his wrist, one still bright as a firework against his ribs. He comes out of it with three: one tarnished and dark, one bright as a firework, and one with a gunmetal gleam to it, hidden between his upper arm and his ribs.

_It’s not about like or dislike, Captain, it’s that I don’t have any reason to trust you._

Once he stops breaking things and being furious (because he’s not _supposed_ to have a third soul mate, not in this time, not in this era, not in this _life_ , Bucky and Peggy are his silvers, he doesn’t need another) he doesn’t quite get it. Because who wouldn’t want to trust Captain America?

( _Feeling lucky, punk?_ )

.

.

.

Maria Hill is born with two soulmarks, and wants neither of them.

The platonic one is easier to manage. She can do platonic, easily, if she has to—or, at least, more easily than romantic. Platonic doesn’t have nearly the sort of stereotype to it that romantic does, because most of the world still seems to think that platonic _means_ less, somehow. That romance, and romantic soul mates, are still the be-all, end-all, overwhelmingly passionate, never-ending love story of Hollywood flicks and teenage romance novels. (She can remember her aunt Christina showing up on their doorstep when she’s three years old, her nose broken, her mouth split, and the bright silver of her romantic soulmark gleaming through the bruises.) Less assumptions means less pressure, and less pressure means fewer issues. She’s good with fewer issues. She likes solved things, likes _solving_ things. Fewer issues means that this mark, at least, is solved.

The platonic one is messy but constrained, easily hidden by her shirts (it’s on her belly, and Maria’s never been a bikini girl anyway). It’s only five words long. _Welcome to SHIELD, Agent Hill._ Her mother isn’t happy about it, not the _SHIELD_ bit or the _Agent_ bit. Maria is about 87% certain that the _Agent_ piece is what upsets her more. (Which comes with its own pitfalls, but she likes pitfalls. If you manage pitfalls right, they turn into traps.)

The romantic soulmark is a little more complicated. Maria’s always had problems with romantic marks, anyway, and it’s not just because of her aunt and uncle. People _expect things_ from romantic soulmarks. They expect marriage and white picket fences, expect weddings and rings and children and a fucking dog for the yard. Maria doesn’t do expectation, doesn’t appreciate it, doesn’t _approve_ of it, and by the time she turns nineteen she’s had it up to here when it comes to people asking if her soulmark is why she decided to go into the armed forces. It’s as if they think that _Excuse me, Corporal, but have I done something to piss you off?_ is the only conceivable reason why someone like her would make that decision, that it’s the only possible motivation behind her choosing a career that will define the entirety of her life.

(She never explains it to those people. She loves her country, loves defying assumption. She loves the physicality of the corps, the ferocity. She wants to save people. She wants to _protect_ people. But they don’t deserve to know that, if they meet her and still think she’s shallow enough to only be doing it for a soul mate she might never even meet. She never explains it. She just lets her silence speak for her.)

(And seriously, what the hell is it even supposed to mean, _soul mate?_ Mate of the soul? It sounds too much like a fantasy, to her, like religion, like God and the Devil and a glorious afterlife for the righteous. Like Santa Claus. One of those things that sounds a hell of a lot better than it could ever actually be, and something that doesn’t really exist at all.

Maria Hill is not in the business of believing in things that don’t actually exist.)

.

.

.

There’s a lot of poking and prodding after he wakes up. It feels precisely the same as when he’d first turned into this, the same as when Project Rebirth succeeded. The only difference is they don’t need a thermometer to take his temperature. Also, the needles are thinner, and don’t hurt as much.

(They don’t need to tell him that Peggy’s alive. He can feel it, a warm spot underneath his breastbone the way he’s always felt Peggy. He imagines sometimes that she started to chalk up her own warm spot to hallucinations, to longing. He knows he would have, after years and years of searching and no success, nothing even close to success, but still, he wonders if maybe she was just so tired of waiting—)

There’s a lot of exclamation when they find the third soulmark, and though Fury himself doesn’t show up, he overhears a few of the lab techs talking about the director of SHIELD throwing a hissy fit (“he was very unhappy,” says one of the techs, but in Steve’s mind? That means hissy fit) when he learns about it.

Steve doesn’t want this third soulmark, but at the same time he can appreciate it a little bit. Fury being angry that something took him by surprise, well. He’s more than all right with that particular image.

.

.

.

“How is it,” Fury says, his voice calm and constrained and extraordinarilycontrolled, “that we had this man in our custody for a full week, sedated—not just sedated, but frozen solid—and _nobody thought to check him for new soulmarks?_ ”

Maria watches in silence, her hands behind her back. Privately, she can understand the miscommunication—no one ever knew anything about Steve Rogers’ and his soul mates, there were never really any records because marks had been the _last_ thing Howard Stark and the SSR were interested in when it came to their own personal super-soldier, and considering Peggy Carter is still alive, it’s easily possible to imagine that Rogers’ third soul mate had been a veteran, too. Publicly, though, she stands with Nick Fury. It was a sloppy mistake, it shouldn’t have happened, and it’s fucked them over in a way they can’t fix. If Steve Rogers has a third soul mate, then that means Steve Rogers has something else tying his allegiance to the world outside of SHIELD.

(It’s cold of her, but SHIELD is still her everything, then. Captain Rogers is critical to the Initiative. If he leaves them, there’s no way Nick Fury will be able to get his Avengers off the ground.)

(She thinks about this again when she sees the bloodstained playing cards, Captain America saluting at the camera, and hates herself.)

.

.

.

He knows SHIELD has him followed in the six weeks he takes for himself, after the Battle of New York. (And he may not ever have really spent much time in Chelsea and Midtown when he was a kid but that’s his city, _his_ city torn to shreds like Paris was, and Berlin, and he’d be a fool if he couldn’t see the horror in that.) He’d have to be far stupider than most people seem to think he is, if he didn’t. There are one too many unmarked cars, one too many tails in sunglasses, one too many of everything. He ignores them. Whatever SHIELD wants, Steve doesn’t particularly care. For the first time in the ten weeks since he came out of the ice, he’s finally starting to slow down. Or the world is starting to speed up again. It could be either one.

He doesn’t visit Peggy. He knows where she is, but he avoids Washington, DC as if it’s an open wound. He avoids New York, too, for the same reason. (Not forever. New York is home. But just for a little while.) He takes back roads and sleeps in nondescript motels that he finds at the last moment, just absorbing. There are telephone lines everywhere, even in the smallest farming town. Every bathroom he enters seems to have hot and cold running water. Nobody cares about buying fruit from the supermarket. Damaged things aren’t fixed; they’re thrown away. It’s as alien as France was to Steve Rogers in 1943, and he learns it through experience, because to be taught implies that he can’t do it himself.

About three weeks into it, he actually lets himself look at the new soulmark. He studies the angles of it, the sharp crosses of the Ts and the way _Captain_ seems to be scrawled out so viciously it would have probably torn paper. And for the first time he actually touches it, on purpose, drawing his fingers along the mark. You can’t really feel your marks, not truly, but sometimes there are temperature differences. This one is cooler than the rest of his skin, the way Bucky’s and Peggy’s never were.

(Sometimes he still wakes up and _swears_ he’s blinking someone else’s eyes, but he always runs up against a wall, like he crashes into bricks, and every time he wakes gasping and hoping that if he does meet this new soul mate, they won’t share the same sort of bond, because he doesn’t think he can bear blinking and seeing through someone else’s vision the way he used to be able to with Bucky—)

The idea that his new silver might not want a soul mate, either, comes to him three days before he returns to SHIELD. It endears him to them just a little.

.

.

.

In a way, Captain Rogers irritates her, and for a long time she can’t quite work out why. Then she hears him talking with Romanoff and Kate Bishop, about death and fate and consequences, and she realizes that it’s because he looks so sad. He survived something that no one else on the _planet_ would ever have been able to survive—possibly no one else in the galaxy. He has a job, he has companions, he has a life. And yet he walks around like he’s standing up against a concrete wall, waiting for someone to blow his head off.

It’s aggravating, and it’s why she doesn’t talk to him. She’s pretty sure the moping would rub off if she did.

So she avoids him, and has no regrets.

.

.

.

Sometimes during his meetings with Fury there’s a tall, dark-haired woman standing by the door, hands behind her back, waiting. He remembers her from the Triskelion, but he can’t for the life of him remember her name. They nod at each other sometimes, but that’s about it.

He thinks she hates him, because she gets this very strange look on her face when she sees him unexpectedly, like she’s just had her day ruined. It’s a bit of a relief to be honest. She’s taller and paler than Peggy was—is, he corrects himself, _is_ —and she holds herself much differently, but they have that same unswerving, terrifying competence, that utter confidence in themselves that other people envy. In a way, she’s much more dangerous than any of the rest of them. She’s too much like the past for him to be comfortable.

So he avoids her, and has no regrets.

.

.

.

Of course, it all blows up when Clint gets into the middle of it. Everything always blows up when Clint gets into the middle of it.

Despite every time they’ve been in the same room—the Triskelion, the helicarrier, everything, all of it—she doesn’t realize she hasn’t actually said a word to Rogers until she’s called into Fury’s office one day, and finds him there waiting with Clint. She’s not entirely sure why she’s even there until she sees the image on the display screens. She doesn’t adjust her expression at all, but Clint—Clint looks like a teenager caught out with his first girlfriend in his dad’s bed.

In a highly trained, highly intelligent, highly capable super-spy-ish way, of course. But still like a shit-scared teenager.

“Sir,” Maria says. “You wanted to see us.”

“Is there a particular reason I had to hear about two of my best agents going on rogue ops from Agent Fucking Romanoff?” says Fury, in the voice that the new recruits have christened _And Now You Shit Yourself._ “Barton. Care to explain?”

“Not particularly,” says Clint. He puts his hands together behind his back. “Sir.”

“Hill?”

“Technically,” Hill says (and it _is_ Hill who says it, not Maria, because right when they first met Fury called her Hill, and Hill is who she is, now), “they were all signed off by the proper authorities.”

“Technically they were,” says Fury. “Just not by _my_ authority.”

“Technically,” Clint interjects, “no rules were broken.”

“And _technically_ ,” Fury replies, his voice getting louder, “they were all _damn fool ideas._ ”

Clint doesn’t flinch. “Phil Coulson’s dead. We’ve all mourned. But he left a hell of a lot of missions unaccounted for, unmanned. It was either finish them, or toss years of work down the drain. The corporal and me decided they needed finishing. Didn’t think you would object.” He pauses. “Sir.”

Rogers’ eyes are flicking between Clint, Hill, and Fury with the same kind of intensity she remembers from the helicarrier. Even as gloomy as he is, he’s smarter than he acts, is Steve Rogers. She’ll have to remember that.

“And I suppose it was the _corporal’s_ idea _—_ ” Fury hates her nickname, she knows, she can feel it in the pricking in her fingers “—to do all of it without telling me.”

“Yes, sir.”                 

“And to involve Agent Romanoff. _And_ Tony Stark.”

“No, the Stark part was all Barton,” says Maria, and Clint gives her a look like she’s just stabbed him in the gut.

“ _Tony Stark_ ,” says Fury again. “What were you going to do, send an email to Asgard? Maybe contact Dr. Banner?”

“Thought that’s what you wanted, sir. A team.”

“Not for things like this.”

Clint’s mouth twists a little. “Why aren’t you snarling at Rogers? He knew we were going on these missions.”

“Because Captain Rogers can do a number of things not even Agent Romanoff can manage, but he’s still the worst damn liar I’ve ever seen working in intelligence. If he’d known they weren’t sanctioned, he wouldn’t have been able to keep it quiet.” Fury pauses. “Rogers.”

“No offense taken,” says Rogers.

“I elected not to get the captain involved.” Maria folds her hands behind her back. “It seemed unnecessary, and besides, I didn’t want to disturb his ruminations.” Rogers glances at her again. She keeps her eyes fixed on Fury, because that’s what she needs to be, at the moment, unwavering and focused. “You asked that I handle everything to do with Phil Coulson’s death, sir, and I did.”

“I told you to close those operations down, not finish them.”

“And respectfully, they needed finishing, not closing.” She closes her hands into fists. There’s a yawning gap between them, now, something she’d never anticipated at the start. She knows Phil Coulson is alive, and that he’s alive because of Fury. Barton and Rogers, they don’t. The least she can do to earn forgiveness for that, from herself if from no one else, is to make sure that Phil’s work—his life, really, because Phil Coulson’s work was his life—doesn’t get shuffled away into bureaucratic bullshit. Not to mention Barton had needed something to do before going stir-crazy or having a complete mental breakdown. Or both, considering everything. “I have a meeting in five minutes with Agent 19, sir. Was there anything else you would like to discuss?”

Fury stares at her. Hill stares back. Then he waves a hand in dismissal. Barton—Clint, again—scoots out of the office like someone’s set his ass on fire. (Again, in a super-spy-ish way.) Maria doesn’t adjust her pace one bit, closing the door carefully (and very, very quietly) behind her.

She hasn’t taken more than three steps when the door opens again, and Rogers catches up with her.

“Excuse me, Corporal, but have I done something to piss you off? Because I can’t think of any other reason why you wouldn’t involve me in this, otherwise.”

On her collarbone, her mark stings like she’s just been jabbed with a needle. She doesn’t say anything. She’s not speechless—actually, she has a hell of a lot of things to say, and most of them are vulgarities—she just keeps her mouth shut. Clearly, it’s making Rogers uncomfortable. He shifts from foot to foot.

“Look, I know you probably hate me, for getting Coulson killed. Because we did get Coulson killed. I just—it looks like I’m sticking around SHIELD for a while. So I wanted to ask if there was anything I could do to help.”

Maria searches his face. She rocks back on the heels of her feet, a bad habit from Catholic school that she still can’t seem to shake. And _shit_. Steve Rogers _does_ have something still tying him to SHIELD. He’ll _always_ have something tying him to SHIELD.

It’s her.

She tells him the truth. He looks at her like she’s the most terrifying thing he’s ever seen, and books it in the other direction.

.

.

.

Steve heads for the Brooklyn Bridge, because he always heads for the Brooklyn Bridge.

It takes a lot less time than he thought it would to bike up there. That, or he’s thinking too hard to really notice it when hours pass on the interstate. _Now what, Rogers,_ he thinks, and the voice sounds like his mother’s and like Bucky’s and like Peggy’s. Like all three at once. _Now what do you do?_

 The look on Hill’s face said enough, even with the marks stinging like frostbite against his ribcage. _It’s not about like or dislike, Captain, it’s that I don’t have a reason to trust you._ And she doesn’t, really. They’ve never exchanged a single word. She’s Fury’s right hand, for God’s sake, she’s practically paid to trust no one. He’s never once seen her smile, or say a word when she didn’t have to. (Actually, today is the most he’s seen her speak _at all_.) He’s actually fairly certain new recruits are just as frightened of her as they are of Fury, and that’s—that says something about her, that’s for certain.

Did Fury know, he wonders. No—he doubts it. Fury may be good at double-bluffing (triple-bluffs, _quintuple_ bluffs) but even in the future, he’s pretty sure there’s no way to tell who someone’s silver or gold is without a name involved in the mark. That or handwriting analysis, which, considering they hadn’t thought to check if the mark was new or not, probably didn’t happen. So she didn’t know, and he didn’t know, and now they _both_ know, and he did the first thing which came to mind.

 _Did you have something against running away_?

Apparently not anymore.

He doesn’t want another soul mate, and clearly, judging by the look on her face—or rather, the _lack_ of expression, the sudden and complete disassociation with any form of emotion, pressing her lips together and just staring at him like she was waiting for him to stab her in the throat—she’s not 100% behind the idea, either. At least, he’s pretty sure she’s not 100% behind the idea. 

He never wanted to meet this third soul mate, anyway. He shouldn’t feel guilty for running away from her. But he _did_ run away from her, he _does_ feel guilty (—and in the back of his head he swears he hears Peggy say that _you seem to have the most ridiculous idea that everything that happens to the people around you is your fault, Steve, and I promise you, that isn’t true—_ ) and now he has absolutely no idea what to say to this woman who is, apparently, his third silver.

_Just bite the bullet and talk to her, Rogers._

It’s Bucky that time. (He has to stop imagining their voices in his head, but God, he misses them. He catches himself with his hands outstretched, reaching through time and space, and they can’t reach back, not anymore, not Peggy who doesn’t remember him half the time, not Bucky who’s gone, who was never, ever found—) Steve props his elbows up on the railing, and stares down into the river.

.

.

.

She’s not stupid. She can’t just avoid Steve Rogers for the rest of her life. She still takes a few days to herself to get over the fact that her romantic soul mate is apparently _Captain America_ before tracking him down.

Maria finally catches up with him in the Triskelion mess, about a week after she’d been called in to meet with Fury. Rogers doesn’t budge an inch when she stops by his table, or when she glares Barton out of the room. (Nat leaves too, but she _slinks_ , like a cat who’s just found not only the cream and the canary but a whole damn pet shop, all to herself.) When she drops down across from him, he doesn’t even twitch.

“There are two things I want to make absolutely clear,” Maria says. “The first is that while I think you are an excellent leader, a good soldier, and probably a good man considering what Nat and Barton have to say about you, I don’t want anything to do with you. Not in regards to—to the circumstances. I will work with you, I will take orders from you in the field, I will give you orders when necessary and have them followed, but I will _not_ be—” her throat sticks. “I’m completely uninterested.”

Rogers just watches her through his eyelashes for a breath or two, turning his fork slowly between his fingers. “That’s very direct, Corporal Hill.”

“I never wanted a soul mate.” He doesn’t flinch. “I never wanted any sort of soul mate. I don’t believe in them, I don’t need one, and to be frank, I think the whole thing should be abolished, but of course that’s impossible.” Maria studies him for a moment, and then adds, “And from what little I know about you, I don’t think you’re too inclined for another soul mate, either.”

“Oh?” He’s still spinning the fork between his fingers. “And what makes you say that?”

“If you wanted one, you would have come after me days ago.”

Rogers doesn’t say anything. Maria leans back in her chair. “So. We work together. We’re colleagues. But that’s it.”

“That’s it,” he repeats, and sticks out his hand. He has long fingers. Maria looks at it for a moment before they shake, and she’s pleased to say that there is not a single bit of tingling or magic or whatever two soul mates touching is supposed to bring about. It’s nothing more than a handshake. She nods once, and stands.

“You said there were two things,” Rogers says, just as she starts to turn away. “What was the other?”

“My title. It’s agent, not corporal. I’m SHIELD, not a Marine. Not anymore.”

“I suppose by that definition, I’m not a captain anymore,” says Rogers, but he nods once. “Agent Hill.”

“Captain,” she says, pointedly, and walks away. When she turns at the door, he’s gazing into his salad like he can find the secrets of the universe there. 

“Well,” she says to the wall, once she’s back in her office. “That could have gone much worse.”

.

.

.

It works, honestly.

It’s almost unexpected. He’s always been told that soul mates are—are infinity, are forever, and in many ways they are. But this is different. He grew up with Bucky, grew _into_ Bucky like Bucky grew into him, and that was one sort of silver that he’d trade his life for in an instant. With Peggy it was slower, they’d been trying to hold off, but at the same time it had been consciously done. They’d both _known_ that they were silvers, both wanted it, and it had been a choice not to really act on it.

Hill is different. She doesn’t want a damn thing to do with it. He knows, cognitively, that the voice he hears on the other end of the comm when he’s out in the field (—and that in and of itself makes it harder, because it’s like the plane, like the crash, but inherently different at the same time, a soul mate speaking in his ear with death on the line but in a different time, a different war, a different _world—_ ) is Maria Hill, his third silver. He knows it in his head, but aside from one or two awkward throat-clearing moments, he doesn’t really feel anything about it. There’s no hint of it in how she treats him, not a single implication. She doesn’t expect or want anything from him. She’s just—she’s Hill. She gets things done. She directs and is directed. She’s just _Hill_ , and outside of work, he never even catches a hint of her. It’s oddly liberating.

He never actually forgets, but most of the time, he doesn’t think about it.

He wonders sometimes if Natasha knows. She has an expression, sometimes, that makes him think she’s put _something_ together, even if she’s not certain. (Who is he kidding? Natasha’s always certain.) But she never says anything, and it’s not like it’s any of her business.

.

.

.

“Did we ever find Rogers’s soul mate?” Natasha says one morning, swinging into the chair opposite Maria and pushing a bagel across to her like a peace offering.

“For an internationally acclaimed spy,” Maria replies, not looking up from her paperwork, “that was a singularly terrible lead-in.”

“What can I say? I thought bribery would be enough.” Nat eyes her. No, Maria thinks. _Tash_ eyes her. The Natasha who bounces into society parties and gossips as if she’s been there for years. Tash, not Nat. And most certainly not Talia. “But really. Never found?”

“If they were, it wasn’t by SHIELD.” She marks the spot Nick needs to sign, sets the paper aside. “Are we done gossiping, or are you going to do my nails next?”

“You’d only chip them.” Tash stands again. “We’re going out to Reggie’s tomorrow to initiate Banner.”

“Initiate or intimidate? I can never tell with you.”

“Either/or. You should come.”

“Is that an order?”

Nat bares her teeth. “Strongly encouraged request.”

“Who else will be there?”

“Clint.” Of course Clint is coming. Clint and Nat are attached at the hip. “Banner himself, obviously. If I can find Stark he’ll probably want to tag along. And Rogers.”

“So the gang’s all here, then.” She switches out her black pen for a blue one. “Reggie’s doesn’t really seem like Rogers’ scene.”

“It’s not. I’m making him. He wanders around looking like half of him is still left in 1945. Besides, he needs friends.”

“Other than you.”

“I’m nobody’s friend,” says Natasha. Maria can’t decide whether or not Nat’s saying it, or Talia. Then she snaps back to Tash, and there’s no way to tell. “Besides. If you come, Clint will be terrified that you’ll report his drunken shenanigans to Fury, and that always makes for a good time. He drinks more when he’s nervous.”

“Only if you leave the bagel,” Maria says, and Nat nods once. The bagel is left behind.

It’s an obvious trap. In a way it’s flattering, because it means Nat knows that Maria would see through any of her more subtle attempts, and has thus given up subtlety altogether. But it’s still a trap.

Best way to deal with a trap is to spring it, though.

She cuts the bagel in two with the plastic knife, and makes it last all the way through until midnight.

.

.

.

“Agent!” Tony’s been drinking a little already, not enough for him to be quite as buzzed as he’s acting—though it’s possible he started before this; Tony’s been odd, lately—but just enough for his words to kind of blend together a little. “I didn’t know the bun came out. I thought it was surgically glued to your scalp. Congratulations. Did you use peanut butter to get rid of the bubble gum?”

“And I left it all on the underside of your desk, too, Stark.” Hill slips into the end of the booth, kitty-corner to Steve. Her hair is loose and down past her shoulders. It looks very odd, somehow. Not as odd as seeing her out of uniform, but still odd. Next to him, Nat rocks sideways, looking pleased with herself. “Natasha.”

Nat smirks. “ _Maria_.”

“Excuse you, but all SHIELD goons lack first names. There’s a special ceremony where it’s erased from official records, and replaced with _Agent._ A very grand tradition.” Tony’s wearing a hat and sunglasses indoors, which don’t do much to hide his identity. People at Reggie’s just don’t care. “There are no first names at the Triskelion. I still persevere in thinking that all of you agents are highly advanced androids here to take over the world.”

“I thought that was Stark Industries,” Clint says, and then winces. Someone must have kicked him under the table. Steve’s money is on Hill.

“I have not yet created an army of evil robots,” says Tony, unknowing. “Made one that burned down my lab once. Oh, Army-Bot, you will be missed.”

“Army-Bot?”

“Armadillo-Robot,” says Banner. He looks very uncomfortable, but he’s squashed into the corner opposite Steve, so there’s no way to get out unless he clambers over Clint and Hill, poor bastard. “The Armadillo-Robot.”

“How do you know about this?”

“I tried to stop him from building it.”

“Banner’s a fun-killer.” Tony steals Steve’s beer, or tries to. Steve shifts it out of the way before he can get a good hand on it. “I call foul and beer-theft. You’re a national icon, Rogers, Jesus. Think of all the history you just spat on.”

“Minus the Prohibition and Edward Teach,” says Hill, and doesn’t look at him. Which is probably a good thing, because Steve just choked on his beer. “Barton.”

Clint dips his head. “Corporal.”

“Were you even _alive_ during the Prohibition?” Tony lists a little. “God, what a horrifying time. I very much like the present. Your future. Whatever. Technically this is your present, too, since you didn’t time travel. But still.”

“Yes, I was alive during the Prohibition.” Bucky used to act as a lookout for rum-runners and bootleggers, a dirty street kid who could perch anywhere and heckle anyone and never really be noticed. Because he’d been Steve’s silver, Steve had been dragged along, too. It hadn’t always ended well. “Definitely glad it ended, that’s for sure. Not so glad about what came after it.”

“I must say something right now.” Tony puts his elbow on the table, points at Hill. “You are _not allowed_ to say the word ‘depression.’ It depresses me.”

“Depression,” Hill says, very deliberately, and then glances at Nat. “How long has he been here?”

“He showed up late.” Natasha, to Steve’s surprise, pats Tony’s hand once or twice, almost affectionate. “Stark, you are completely trashed right now, and it’s slightly worrying. Do I need to hand you off to a cab driver?”

“I have a chauffeur.” Tony lists into the vinyl seatback, and then tips sideways onto Nat, which is a priceless image. “He’s a good chauffeur. I drive him everywhere.”

“That’s not the point of a chauffeur, Stark.”

“And the point of armor is that it _covers your body_ , Barton, not shows off your guns to all the ladies in the vicinity.”

Clint makes a noise like a steaming kettle. Steve cocks an eyebrow at Banner, and then stares into his drink.

“So I didn’t get a chance to ask,” Hill says around Clint. She’s not looking at him. She’s watching Banner, carefully. It’s not in a _you could kill me_ way, more a thoughtful one, and Steve’s estimation of her shifts, a little. She might be willing to have a plane open fire on the Hulk, but she doesn’t treat Banner any differently for it. “How are you adjusting to the new Stark Tower, Dr. Banner?”

Banner’s eyes get wide. He always acts surprised when people notice him. “It’s, ah. It’s very enlightening.”

“Has Stark stolen all your pens yet? Because I heard that he has a habit of doing that.”

So did Howard. Which is not what Steve needs to remember right now, really. (Because according to Pepper Potts Howard spent more time looking for Steve than he ever did being Tony’s father, and before he’d seen Peggy for the first time after the ice, before that moment, he would never have been able to imagine why Howard would abandon his own child, even if he hated kids the way he always claimed he did, but after hearing her say _Howard wanted you back just as much as I did_ , it all makes sense, and he feels like an asshole even though he knows it’s not his fault, because he never noticed, and maybe if he’d noticed—)

Banner’s lips twitch. He ducks his head. “Not—not all of them, no.”

“If you play your cards right you can probably get them back.” Hill’s mouth twists into half a smile. “Set Pepper on him, it helps. That or threaten him with a history lecture.”

“The only worthy subject is science,” Tony says, and shuts his eyes. “Someone turn the sun off.”

“We’re not outside,” says Clint.

“The sun is hereby illegal and should be removed from the ecosystem. I can build something better. More energy efficient. I excel at efficiency.”

“Which is why your suit is hot-rod red.”

“Hold your tongue, Natalie.”

“Actually.” Hill shifts, and Steve realizes all at once that she’s watching him with the same careful look she’d used with Banner. “You might be the authority on the history lectures. Banner can stick to using pepper spray.”

Tony winces. “Don’t pepper spray me, it hurts.”

“It seems like a pretty specific strategy.” Steve turns his glass in his hands. “Clearly Stark’s not much of a history buff—”

“I’m an _everything_ buff, Rogers, I am buff in everything—”

“—but it doesn’t seem like your sort of style.”

“I like history.” Hill shrugs. “He hacked into my tablet one day and found some of my personal reading. Now he writes his reports in complex equations just to prove that mechanical engineering and thermonuclear astrophysics are the dominant academic spheres.”

“She writes all his mission assignments in historical metaphor,” says Clint. “We take bets on how many things he’ll blow up when he tries to translate them.”

There’s something creeping across his face that might be a smile. “Doesn’t seem very professional.”

She shrugs. “Since when is working with Tony Stark a study in professionalism? Besides, it means he reads them, if only to try and prove he can beat me. I’m not above to using dirty tactics if it means the job gets done.”

“Dirty tactics,” Tony repeats, and giggles like a teenager.

There’s something in the way she says it that makes him wonder, something deeper, but he’s not about to pry into it. Steve shrugs right back at her. “Works for me.”

“You are _endorsing_ cruel and unusual punishment!” Tony paws at his shoulder. “ _Cruel_. And _unusual._ That is illegal. And un-American. It’s in the goddamn Constitution.”

“I’ve found that a lot of people say that without ever having read the Constitution,” Steve tells Tony. He looks back at Hill. “Happy to help, if you want.”

 “I’ll send you the next draft, then,” Hill says, and accepts her glass from one of the waitresses. “I’m putting in a lot of D-Day references, and I’ll need someone to check them.”

There’s a small crease at the corner of her lips that’s almost like a smile. If he has to look back on it, that’s probably the moment when Hill became a little more complicated. Still, living it, he doesn’t think about it all that much. Instead, he wonders— _when did colleagues become co-conspirators?_ “If you’re sure,” Steve says, finally. Hill traces her fingertip around the rim of her glass.

“Who better to check my history than someone who lived through it?”

There’s another message under that, too. He considers. _Work colleagues,_ he thinks. Apparently to Hill, colleagues and friends can have the same definition.

“The Barrow and Parker maneuver,” he says, once he’s sure she’s not retreating. Hill chokes on her mouthful of beer, and sets her glass on the table again, shoulders shaking. Natasha looks very pleased. Banner and Clint are just confused. And Tony—

“I dislike the fact that you’re ignoring me,” says Tony.

“Shut up, Tony,” say Clint and Banner together.

Natasha pats Tony’s hand again, but this time, it’s in a very _keep your mouth closed before I cut it off_ sort of way.

Tony shuts up.

.

.

.

It’s after the Mandarin but before the incident in Greenwich when Rogers stops by her office at about nine on a Friday evening. She doesn’t even notice him at first, which she kicks herself for, later. Even if she’s somehow been adopted into the circle of people that Fury calls _the Avengers Initiative_ and the rest of the world calls _those fucking nutbags in super-suits,_ she shouldn’t be comfortable enough for any of them to be able to sneak up on her. She’s learned her lesson about comfort, and it’s usually bad. Still, when Rogers knocks twice on her half-open door, Maria has to close her fingers very tight around the circumference of her stylus to keep herself from starting. “Rogers,” she says, without looking up. “Can I help you?”

“You’re still here.” He sounds confused. Maria looks up at him for a moment, and then back down at her tablet, unsure as to what the problem is.

“So are you.”

“I had a report to finish.”

“So did I.” There’s a beat. Then she pushes her tablet away, leaning back into her chair. “Did you come for a particular reason, or—?”

He taps on the door again, probably absent-mindedly. Then he glances once down the hall. “Some of the baby agents say you’re always here, no matter what time it is.”

“I don’t have much of a social life.” She tosses her stylus to the table. “Was there something you wanted?”

He studies her, his eyebrows magneting. Fury’s right; Steve Rogers can’t lie worth shit. No damn poker face. “No,” he says. Then—“Actually, yes. I wanted to apologize. For being an ass.”

She doesn’t say anything. She just cocks her head. He scuffs a hand through his hair (and a man who has singlehandedly liberated an entire POW camp, flown a plane into the Arctic Ocean, battled an alien invasion, and currently sidelines as the leader of a SHIELD special ops task force should not be able to look that much like a chastised schoolboy). “When we met, I mean. It wasn’t a good time—it was never gonna be a good time, but I ran away, and that was—immature. I wanted to apologize about that.”

“You don’t have to apologize. It’s not as if I was offended.”

“But I was still an ass by any definition.”

“We’ll agree to disagree.” There’s another beat. “Apology accepted.”

Rogers shifts his weight around, like some of the tension in his spine has been replaced elsewhere. “Okay.” He cocks his head back at her. “I was going to meet Nat at a dive bar. Do you want to come?”

She nearly chokes on her water. “Rogers—”

“I think it’s been established that we’re drinking colleagues.” He’s _joking_ , the bastard. There’s a smile tugging at the corners of his lips. “And if I go out alone with Nat again she’s either going to pick a fight or make me drink cheap vodka. Or both. Even if I can’t get drunk, I don’t want to suffer alone.”

“You can’t get drunk?”

“Was that not in the reports?”

“They didn’t mention it, no.” She bites the inside of her cheek. “So what you’re asking, precisely, is, _do I want to come along with Captain America and the Black Widow while they hit dive bars in Washington, DC_?”

“That’s about the long and the short of it,” says Rogers serenely.

 _Bad idea._ And it is. Keeping Rogers and her soulmark separate is one thing when they just work together. If she starts actually spending time with him, it gets way more complicated. _Bad idea._ But somehow, strangely, hitting a trashy bar with Nat and Rogers sounds…not entirely terrible.

“Keep the mojitos away from me,” she says, finally. “I’m allergic to mint leaves.”

“Noted,” he replies, and waits until she’s shut everything down. They keep a careful distance between them as they leave the building. Maria’s still very glad that most reasonable people have already gone home for the night, and that the unreasonable ones aren’t paying attention.

The next morning (her headache is nominal, Nat’s pitch perfect as always even if she’s wearing sunglasses, and Rogers is indefinably smug about the whole thing) she gets a text from Tony Stark which reads _and now ur stealin my friends v not cool agent._

 _The Salami strategy has a long and storied history, Stark,_ she replies, and turns off her phone before dropping it in the bottom drawer of her desk. When she turns it back on, there are a lot of jokes about salamis and male anatomy, but Stark seems to have forgiven her for…whatever it was.

She doesn’t understand Tony Stark at all.

.

.

.

“You’re playing a dangerous game, here, Rogers.”

It’s Nat. Why is he not surprised that it’s Nat? It’s always Nat. She tips her glass back and forth with two fingertips, not looking at him. It’s as if the grain of the bartop has turned into a Botticelli painting with all the attention she’s paying it. Steve puts his beer down (he can’t get drunk, but he does still like the taste) and crosses his arms over his chest.

“You wanna clarify, Romanoff?”

“Hill.” She tilts her head, not glancing up from the bartop. Hill and Barton are arguing over by the dartboard, but it’s too noisy in here for him to hear anything. He’s not sure about Nat, though. Sometimes she acts like she can’t catch anything, and other times it’s as if she has a hunting dog’s hearing, always pricked for something interesting. “Whatever you’re doing, it’s gonna burn one or the both of you if you’re not careful.”

Steve stills, just for a moment. Before he can think of what to say, Natasha blows hair out of her face. “And don’t say you’re not dancing around something, because even if _she_ can lie, you can’t. And I know all of her tells already, so there’s no point in pretending it’s not obvious.”

He picks the safest part of that, because _Jesus, Romanoff._ “Hill has tells?”

“If you pay attention.” She looks at him, finally, and cocks an eyebrow. “Well?”

Steve searches her face. Whatever she wants, he’s pretty sure she’s not going to stop until he answers. “What did Hill say to you?”

“She didn’t say a thing. Which is how I know there _is_ something.” Her eyes dip to his ribs and back up again. “You ever call her _corporal_ , oh captain, my captain?”

He winces. “Don’t, Nat.”

“I knew it,” Nat says. “Both of you are very obvious.”

“ _Obvious_?”

“You get gloomy. She gets twitchy.”

“I do not get _gloomy._ ” He turns his mug in his hands. “We decided it wasn’t going to happen and moved on. There’s no reason to be gloomy. Besides, what business is it of yours?”

“Everything is my business.” Nat leans back. “Hill has a good head on her shoulders that way. Never bought in to the fantasy. You, though—you’re a romantic, even if you deny it. Which means that if _you’re_ running scared, it’s probably because you’re trying to be loyal to the people who were left behind.”

“You sound like you just stepped in something nasty.”

“It’s…sweet.” Nat frowns, like this is a foreign concept. “Also it’s slightly depressing. I can’t work out if I should be sad for you, or proud of your loyalty.”

“Is there a point?”

They look at Hill in unison, like it’s been scripted. No one should ever be playing darts with Clint Barton and still be able to win, but apparently, Hill is. Either Clint’s drunker than he realized, or Hill’s cheating somehow. Then Nat looks back at him.

“Don’t do the romantic thing and fall in love with her anyway, Rogers. It won’t end very well.”

 _I’m not going to_ , he nearly says, but Nat’s already stood and slipped away into the crowd, vanishing between bodies. Banner’s lurking near the door, looking uncomfortable. Steve watches as condensation rolls down the side of his glass.

.

.

.

She gets the call at about four in the morning on a Tuesday. The team has just wrapped up a mission in the DRC that has to do with international drug smuggling, mainly MGH. The guards were all mutated, and the mission itself was hell. She’s been awake for three days in a row, had far too much coffee, and all the code words are mixed up in her head to the point that she’s barely coherent even when she _can_ speak civvie English. So when she stops halfway out of the helicarrier to find that her phone has six messages and four missed calls, she’s sincerely tempted to just ignore it and call back later.

It’s her father. Maria presses her finger in close to her ears as the rest of the strike team files past her, Nat giving her a top-to-toe glance as she slows. (Maria waves her on. She doesn’t need the Black Widow to defend her from her own father.) He picks up on the third ring. “Ria.”

“Is there something wrong?” she asks, no lead-in, no hello, because she just doesn’t have that sort of relationship with her parents. If not for the soulmark, she would have told them she worked in HR. They’re not very interested in speaking to their wayward military sheep. “You never call.”

“I need you to come back to Michigan,” he says. “Your mother’s in the hospital.”

She stops and starts again. Maria closes her eyes, takes one breath, holds it. “What happened?”

“Does it matter what happened?”

“It does if you’re asking me to drop everything I’m working on right now. My work is time-sensitive.”

“So is she.” He blows out air, and it turns the phone to static. “She’s been sick for months, Maria. It’s cancer. She’s dying.”

She hears someone stop on the ramp, but oddly muffled, like someone’s shoved candle wax into her ears. Maria turns her back. “Nobody said anything to me.”

“You didn’t seem to want to know,” her father says, his voice flat. She counts to four, and then to seven, because she doesn’t know what to say. “She wants to see you. God knows why.”

And she’ll punch him for that one, she really will. But to her dad, she was the eldest child, the first child, and the first and only girl. Her three brothers were always more along his line, simply because she was incomprehensible to him. And, she thinks, dizzily, it seems like she still is. “Which hospital?” she asks, finally. Her dad tells her, and hangs up without a goodbye. When she opens her eyes, she catches a glimpse of the shield, and nearly walks away.

Rogers’ hair is dark with sweat, still, and there’s a smear of something on his cheek that could be mud or blood or both. The rest of the team is gone. She’s going to kill Nat. “Hill?”

“Nothing.” She shoves her phone back into her pocket. “It’s personal.”

Rogers cocks his head, and then slowly inclines his head. “All right.”

He’s turning around, about to walk away, when she realizes her palms are clammy. Something’s quaking inside her, like she’s going to throw up. Maria must make a sound, some kind of noise, though for the life of her she can’t remember doing it, because Rogers snaps back around with his eyebrows in his hairline, like she’s screamed.

“Hill?”

She doesn’t say anything. She presses the back of her hand to her lips, shaking her head once. Rogers looks around them, and decides. “This way,” he says, and she follows without question, because it’s not Rogers who says it. It’s Captain America.

She’s known for a while that the Triskelion administration set aside a training room for the strike team’s personal use ages ago, because having Rogers train in with the rank and file generally led to insanity. She’s never been here before, though, not since her last tour of the building (which was months ago) so when he ushers her in and shuts the door, she can take a moment to assess the place. Clean, though it smells like a gym. There are punching bags with the Stark logo on them lined up along the far wall. He looks up at the video camera in the corner, and then turns, so that he’s between her and the surveillance feed. There’s no sound for the camera in this room, she remembers. He’s keeping some unnamed security guard from being able to read her lips and know her business.

“What happened?”

Maria sets her hands behind her back. It’s not anything to do with him. They’ve already decided that nothing is going to happen, not between the pair of them, even if they work together. Even if sometimes he drags her out of her office to a bar with the rest of the Avengers, like she’s one of them, even set apart. There’s a difference, she thinks, between sharing history jokes at Tony Stark’s expense, and trusting him enough to tell him that her mother is apparently on her deathbed, and nobody thought she should know about it.

“Hill,” Rogers says, and he’s very quiet, all of a sudden. “Did something happen?”

She knits her hands together. She shouldn’t say anything. But she’s so sick and goddamn tired of being the last to know just because she didn’t want to give herself up to follow her parents’ grand scheme, just because she joined the Marines instead of the YWCA and stopped going to church and spends her days making decisions that have international consequences. She’s so goddamn done with it all, the lingering looks on her collarbone ( _who do you think he is, Ria?_ ) and her stomach ( _I wish you would cover that one up more_ ), the sense that even though she’s the eldest, and the steadiest, and the one with the least amount of arrests to her name, she’s still the family disappointment. She’s just done with it. So she opens her mouth, and says, “My mother is dying of cancer. And apparently, my family only just remembered to tell me.”

Rogers goes very still. “Where is she?”

“Ypsilanti.” The name slips out of her like water. She doesn’t think he realizes how much of a gift that is. “Michigan.”

“Can you get there in time?”

“Probably,” she says, and doesn’t move. Rogers doesn’t frown. He just watches her.

“Do you want to?”

Maria lets her hands fall to her sides again. She’s in tac gear and has two knives on her right now in addition to all her guns; she shouldn’t feel so nakedly vulnerable. “I don’t know.”

Rogers sucks his teeth. Then he glances over his shoulder at the camera. “My mother had TB,” he says. “Worked in one of the wards. Caught it eventually, though she tried damn hard not to. On one of the really bad days, I went next door to ask our neighbor for help. I was smaller, then. I couldn’t always help her sit up properly, especially when the coughing fits were bad. When we came back—couldn’t have been more than five minutes—she was already gone.” He meets her eyes. “It’s not in the reports, is it?”

“Just that she died.” She shakes her head once. “I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be. I half-expected it every time I left her alone for more than thirty seconds.” He pinches the bridge of his nose, and she realizes he’s been awake for just as long as she has. He’s a super-soldier, can hold himself together better, but there are rings under his eyes. “I didn’t tell you that to make you feel like you should go. Whatever your relationship with your family is, you should do what you feel capable of doing. If that means calling her, instead of visiting, fine. I’m not going to judge you for that.”

“But,” Maria says, because she can hear the _but_ coming before he even gets close. Rogers looks at her.

“But if you do go,” he says, “I want you to know that I’ll come with you. If you need me to.”

She clenches her hands into fists. “Because of the circumstances?”

“Because you’re my friend.”

Maria’s fingers are shaking, a little. She swallows once, and looks away, staring at the rock wall until it fades out. She’s not about to fucking cry. She’s _not_ going to. So she closes her eyes and breathes until she knows she won’t.

“I’ll think about it,” she says in a steady voice. Much steadier than she feels. Rogers searches her face, and then nods. He steps back.

“Okay.”

.

.

.

Fury is _not happy_ when Hill vanishes for two days, but Steve doesn’t feel particularly inclined to enlighten him.

It’s not really any of Fury’s business, first of all. (He checks the message Hill left behind and all it says is _personal issues_ , which means that he might be the only one who knows. He’s not sure how he feels about that.) Secondly, Maria Hill spends every moment of every day working for SHIELD, whether she’s in her office or at home or in the field. (Especially in the field. She doesn’t join them often—she has too much work to do with the administration—but when she does, she’s petrifying efficient even when you think of her regular persona, even when you think of her in her clean uniform and her neat hair. In the Triskelion, she’s sharp as glass. In the field, she’s a glass knife, sharpened to a molecular edge.) If she needs two days or two weeks or two months to go and be with her mother while her mother is dying, then she _will_ have that time, if Steve Rogers has anything to say about it.

Some part of him wishes he’d gone with her, instead of letting her disappear as soon as his back was turned. But she hadn’t wanted him there, and no matter what their marks say, he doesn’t really have a _right_ to be there. So he shrugs when Fury comes at him with the footage, and says, “Not my place to say,” because it isn’t, really. And surprisingly, Fury lets it go. Even more surprisingly, Nat never even brings it up. 

At midnight on Thursday, his phone goes off. The text reads, _Nat said you covered for me._ Steve stares at it on and off for another hour before he responds.

_How bad was it?_

Fifteen minutes go by. It’s both an eternity and a moment.

 _Alcohol is necessary for that part of the overview,_ Hill says, and he blows air out through his nose. It should take him a lot longer to consider this idea, but to be honest he’s been thinking about it since Hill had disappeared. He swypes it out.

_Too tired for Reggie’s?_

This time it’s only forty-six seconds (and no, he was not counting).

_I land in two hours._

He’s not sure if _I land in two hours_ means _I will meet you at the airport_ or _I will meet you at the bar_ , so he stands around looking like an idiot for about forty minutes until the commercial flight (because it is a commercial flight, she wouldn’t use SHIELD birds for something like this) from Detroit finally arrives late. He’s more used to seeing her out of uniform, now that she’s started turning up at the bar all on her own, but even then, he has to do a double-take when she files out with the rest of the passengers. She’s drowning in a worn Ann Arbor sweatshirt that’s gray from too many washings, and her hair is down. Seeing Maria Hill with her hair down is like seeing an Iriomote mountain cat in the wild—as in, impossible a good 99% of the time. She stops when she sees him, and blinks twice. Her eyes are dry. They’re not even red. “You came,” she says, and he shoves his hands in his pockets.

“I wasn’t sure what you meant.”

“You could have asked.”

He shrugs. “Could have.”

She peers at him down the length of her nose, and Steve realizes, belatedly, she’s wearing reading glasses. “Okay, then,” she says, and shrugs her duffel bag up higher over her shoulder. “I assume you drove.”

Shit. He didn’t think about that. “Bike. Sorry.”

“I had someone drop me off.” In Hill’s case, _someone_ usually means _Nat._ “So I can catch a cab.”

“I can take you, it’s okay.” She doesn’t look uncomfortable, exactly, but she holds herself a bit more closely than she was before, which is why he adds, “If you want.” Steve wonders if talking to Hill will always be a careful tread between being friendly and unsettling her entirely.

She peers at him again, but then she shrugs. He doubts she’s slept more than six hours in total during the past week. She’s definitely listing a little when she thinks he’s not paying attention. “Okay.”

The last time he had someone riding his bike with him, it was 1944, and it was because Morita had taken a slug to the leg that kept him from running. This is about as impersonal, and conducted in total silence, because as much as she’s trying to hide it, Hill’s dozing. He can only make out the edges of her face in the rear view mirror. Her breathing is very steady, and she reacts every time he makes a turn, leaning into it like she has experience on a motorcycle (which she obviously does, she’s a SHIELD agent and Fury’s right hand) but other than that there’s not a twitch from her. Reggie’s closes at four, and it’s three-forty by the time they get there. Still, the barman knows them, and waves them in with only a “keep an eye on the clock” before delivering Hill’s whiskey and scuttling. He does a double-take with her hair, too.

She downs it in one go, and Steve blinks. “Hill.”

“You,” she tells him, “have not had my week.” The bartender gets her another one, and she drinks it more slowly, stopping halfway through. She sets the tumbler down on the bar-top with the utmost delicacy. “Does Nat know you’re here?”

“No.”

“Good. I don’t need her nagging me.” Hill drags her fingertip around the rim of the glass. A habit, he thinks, for when she’s considering what to say. “You’re not even going to ask, are you.”

It’s not a question. He answers anyway. “Do you want me to ask?”

“I don’t actually know.” Steve blinks at her. She looks surprised she even said it. Hill glares at her whiskey. “I shouldn’t tell you any of it. It’s unprofessional.”

“So is bothering Tony Stark with history jokes.” Steve shrugs again. “I think I can handle ignoring professionalism for an hour or so.”

Her lips twitch. Then she sighs, like she’s drawing up air from the bowels of the earth, and cups both hands around her glass. “It was breast cancer, apparently. They didn’t catch it until late. The doctor told me that she’s been in and out of the hospital for the past year for chemo, but it never worked. My dad didn’t even tell me that much. Apparently none of my family thought I would care. My mother and I did—not have the best relationship.” She pauses, tapping her forefinger against the counter. “My brother said I hated her, to my face. When I didn’t back down, he went to hit me. I put him on the ground in the hospital parking lot. Pretty sure I’m disowned, now.”

Jesus Christ. Not for the first time since Project Rebirth, Steve wishes he could get drunk. “Did you break a bone?”

“I think I dislocated his shoulder. I don’t remember really. Things are fuzzy. I didn’t sleep much.” Her knuckles are split and bruised, too, like someone’s teeth gouged into the flesh there. “The security guards had to pull us apart.”

“You have a brother?”

“I have four.” And that explains a few things about Hill that he hadn’t realized he’d been thinking about. “They think the same thing Richard does. Pretty sure. None of them actually told me, but you can tell, when it comes to family.”

She says it flatly, like she’s discussing the pros and cons of watercress on sandwiches. When he looks at her eyes, though, it’s like he’s looking into shattered crystal. “No lecture?” The corner of her mouth twists sideways. “No _try to be better?_ Very unlike you, Captain. All your cartoons lied to me.”

That stings more than he likes. “Actually, I was thinking you did the right thing, defending yourself.” Steve focuses on the mirror, on the reflection of them side by side. It’s unnerving him, for reasons he doesn’t want to inspect too closely. “What did the rest of them do?”

“My brothers?” She shrugs. “They usually ignore it when Richard and I go at each other. I did punch John in the face too, though. But he was drunk at the time, so I’m fairly certain he thinks he started a bar fight.” She toasts him with her whiskey, and finishes it. “Christ. I didn’t mean to say that. _I’m_ drunk.”

“You don’t get drunk that fast.”

“I may have been drinking on the plane,” she says, wry. “That’s what you’re supposed to do when your mother dies of a disease you didn’t even know she had, isn’t it? Get drunk. You know what the worst part is?”

She’s unraveling. It’s terrifying in the way that natural disasters are terrifying, transfixing and grotesque at once. “What?”

“She didn’t even wake up,” Hill says. “Before this, I hadn’t heard a word from her in five years. Hadn’t reached out. And when I finally see her, she was on so much pain medication that she didn’t even know I was there. She wanted to tell me something, but my dad lied to me and said he didn’t know what it was. She never opened her eyes.”

She doesn’t cry. He’s not sure why it hits him so hard, his view of her in that moment, brittle and crackling but dry-eyed as stone, but it does. Steve has no idea what to say, so he says nothing, instead. Hill drops one foot free of the rungs of her barstool, swinging it through the air like a middle-school kid.

“Why the fuck are you even here?” She looks at him, pushing her reading glasses up when they slip. “I told you, I don’t want a soul mate. I don’t want an _anything_. I’m not broken in half just because I happen to have someone’s first words on my skin. I’m not anything _lesser_ just because I don’t want a fairy tale or a happy-ever-after. You’re not going to get anything from me, Rogers, not like that. So why the fucking hell are you still here?”

He meets her gaze, unblinking. “For the same reason I’d be here if it was Barton or Romanoff or Banner. You’re a colleague and a friend, and you shouldn’t be alone right now. Not after this.”

Nat’s right. Hill twitches when she’s uncomfortable. She looks away from him, and slides off the stool. Or she tries to, anyway; she can’t quite stick the landing, and he has to catch her elbow to keep her from splitting her chin open on the counter. “Fuck,” she says. Hill has a mouth on her, when she’s not being an agent. “Goddammit.”

“Come on, soldier,” he says. “You’re staying on my couch.”

“Thought old-school chivalry would have made you offer the bed.”

“No. I just did laundry and you smell like booze.”

She doesn’t laugh. Maria Hill doesn’t do anything so inane as laughing. But she does snort, and when he keeps a hand on her elbow to make sure she doesn’t trip over herself, she doesn’t automatically yank away.

(Later he catches himself sketching that image, a breakable, clear-eyed Maria Hill with glasses slipping down her nose and a strand of dark hair curled against her cheek. He refuses to think that it means something.)

.

.

.

Somehow (and she’s not quite certain how it happened, but she’s pretty sure it started the day of the phone call, or maybe the night after her mother died, with her knuckles still sore and vodka and whiskey in her system and _you’re a colleague and a friend and you shouldn’t be alone_ ) she starts to find herself at Rogers’ apartment without much of a clue about how she wound up there in the first place.

She doesn’t take any time off, after her mother’s death. There’s a ceremony to cast Marissa’s ashes off of the white cliffs at Dover, but that’s scheduled for next year, and she’s not sure she’s going to go, anyway. Most days, work helps keep her from remembering the entire disaster that was her trip to Ypsilanti, keeps her mind on track and her brain away from the gaping hole that’s tracing her every step. But some days are terrible—are _terrible,_ as in, shitting in a bucket and locked in a four-by-four room without lights or a bed and knowing there are rats in the walls terrible—and he always seems to know.

(She’s never quite sure how he knows, either, considering they don’t seem to have _any_ sort of reactions in regards to the soulmarks. She knows people with emotive bonds, with dream-exchange, with pain-sharing and all of the rest of it, but she and Rogers have none of these things, mostly because those things require an acceptance of the bond, and that’s one thing she’s definitely _not_ going to give.)

She’d be offended that she’s so easy to read if not for the fact that he spends most of his free time with Natasha Romanoff, who has been able to pick out every flaw in her façade since the first five minutes of their acquaintance. Regardless of how he figures it out, he stops by her office on his way out, and drags her away from her desk and the skeleton of her mother hiding in the closet, hissing _you never gave a shit about us anyway, Maria, why the hell did you come back unless it was to rub it in our faces_ —

He seems determined to keep her talking, though about what, she can’t say. There doesn’t seem to be any sort of rhyme or reason to the topics he chooses, and she wonders if that’s the point. They avoid the Triskelion, because there are still reporters who linger near the gates desperate for a photo of Captain America. Eventually, he offers his apartment (looking more like a schoolboy than she’s ever seen him, and that includes when he apologized for literally fleeing in terror) and she shrugs and says “I don’t care as long as there’s beer,” so that…happens. Apparently without incident. Not frequently, because the likelihood of both of them having enough time to manage it is once in a blue moon, but it does happen. Once every two weeks, maybe less. It’s still often enough that she starts thinking (never when he’s around, which is a miracle) that this is like playing with fire. She doesn’t want or need a soul mate, has never wanted or needed a soul mate, but somehow Rogers has wormed his way into being her friend. Which could be worse, if she’s being really honest. Before, even if they wound up at the same bars sometimes, she could at least ignore Rogers for the most part. Now she _can’t_ , and that could be exceptionally dangerous.

The point is to make her think about things other than her family, though, and they succeed at that. She doesn’t talk about herself again, not like she did the night she flew back, but Rogers talks a _lot_. She’s never actually heard him speak so much to someone other than Nat, and even then she thinks he doesn’t go on for quite this long. He tells her about Brooklyn in the twenties and thirties, about the speakeasy that was hidden in the basement of the building at the end of their street. He tells her about rationing and living in the Depression, about the newspapers screaming the names _Bonnie and Clyde,_ about the refugees from the dust bowl South with their burlap dresses, patterned all over with _wheat flour_ and _brown sugar_. He talks about the people in his neighborhood and later in his team, because it’s impossible to talk to Steve Rogers without talking about Captain America. (She’s getting much better at differentiating the two, though. Captain America is the one who jumps out of planes without a parachute and can take down sixteen men with his bare hands. Steve Rogers is the man who sits with his back up against the base of the couch, not quite looking at her as he tells a story about Falsworth and Montgomery in the French countryside, or Dugan and Barnes pulling a prank on Peggy Carter.)

He doesn’t talk about Carter much. Bucky Barnes is present in most of his stories (and of course he would be, she thinks, sipping at her beer, considering they’d known each other since they were little more than babies, running around barefoot in Brooklyn and getting shards of glass in their feet) but Carter he almost never mentions. She doesn’t think he knows just how much that says, the silence.

One night in mid-January, though, there’s a mission that goes wrong. Hostage situation in Poland. Maria’s lead on comms from a SHIELD safehouse (she thinks that Rogers wanted her to come in with them, but their usual comms man is out with a bullet in the shoulder that won’t heal properly, and so she’s back in her chosen habitat, the one with wires and cords and a headset nestled close into her ear), and she can hear it going FUBAR as if it’s unfolding in front of her eyes.

There’s some question, later, as to who fucked up. In Maria’s professional opinion—at least, in the beginning—Brock Rumlow needs to do his goddamn job instead of posturing like a frat boy on steroids. In _Rumlow’s_ opinion, the sniper snuck past him without even a sound, which shouldn’t be possible. Maria sees the man incoming on her infrared screen, not there until he _is_ (cloaking technology or something else, she’s not sure, and after the Triskelion falls she wonders if that was the point, if Rumlow let the man by in an attempt to get Captain America out of the way and they just failed spectacularly enough that innocents were caught crossways). There’s shouting and gunfire and Nat’s speaking in Russian, reporting in clipped, direct sentences. Maria’s the only one who understands it on either end, because it’s half-slang, half-code, the style of speech that clings on from Nat’s Red Room days. _Parakeet’s wings are clipped, we’d be damn lucky to come across a saint._ Or: _hostage down. Medical attention needed ASAP._

Their hostage—a thermonuclear physicist who could have been on par with Bruce Banner, if not for his disenchanting tendency to be both highly sexist and extraordinarily one-track-minded—dies in a Krakow alleyway with blood bubbling over his throat. The sniper’s dead before that, his head smashed in by Brock Rumlow and a socket wrench. Rogers is bleeding and silent when they return to base, and the rest of the team is watching him as if they’re waiting for a bomb to go off.

(Natasha sits in the cockpit with Maria, the blood still crusting on her hands. She doesn’t even move until they’re crossing the Atlantic. Natasha draws one knee up against her chest, tipping her head towards Maria.

“You think that’s in my ledger?” she asks.

It’s flippant, until it isn’t. Maria doesn’t answer for a while. She can feel Natasha watching her, unblinking, the way a feral cat will stare at the hand that feeds it. Like when it takes the food from your fingertips, it’ll take your finger off, too.

“I think the ledger’s defined by how many times you pull the trigger,” Maria says finally. “Not how many times the trigger was pulled.”

Talia hums. Still, by the time they get back to DC, she’s less of a ghost and more of a woman, which Maria supposes is something.)

She’s just showered and curled back into her Ann Arbor sweatshirt when she hears the knocking, and wonders if she’s imagining it. Maria’s still too high on the nerves from Poland to not hold her gun in one hand as she peers through the security hole. Rogers is too tall for her to quite make out his face, but the T-shirt is familiar, and he must hear her on the other side, because he says, “It’s just me,” loud enough that she can hear it through the wood. Maria rests her gun and her fingertips against the door for one heartbeat, two. Then she undoes the latch.

Rogers is still in the gym clothes he keeps in the Triskelion lockers, and his hair is soaked through with sweat. Which means, for Rogers, that he’s probably been running since they touched down seven hours ago, all around the city. Maria leans on her door frame, crossing her arms over her chest. His eyes dip, but to the gun, not her breasts. “Rogers.”

“Hill.”

“It’s two in the morning.” And it’s snowing. There’s flakes dusting his hair, barely visible. “Are you done doing windsprints?”

“I wasn’t doing windsprints.”

“You always do windsprints.” She eyes him, and then steps aside. “In.”

He obeys without a word, because she knows the look on his face. It’s the shattered soldier look, the frustration and the fury and the utter helplessness of an aftermath, and there’s an odd tension underneath her sternum when she watches him toe his shoes off and she realizes that he’s decided this is a safe place for the fallout. (Which is ridiculous, because she’s already decided _his_ place is safe for any sort of fallout—she wouldn’t keep finding herself there otherwise—but the reversal is throwing her off.) Maria sets her gun back on safety and leaves it on the tiny table near her kitchen. “Does coffee not work on you, either?”

“Not particularly. The caffeine burns off fast.” He stands, aimless, in the middle of her entryway until she scoots past him towards the kitchen. Then he follows. Her mother used to use the word _riled_ to describe someone who looked coiled to strike. Steve Rogers, right now, is _riled._ “I’ll take some if you’re making it, though.”

She nods, and says nothing. Maria can hear him shifting around as she doles out the coffee mix, sets the water to boiling. He’s not pacing, exactly, but he’s not sitting still, either. Some kind of mix between the two that ends with him perched on the very edge of one of her barstools, as if he’s about to run.

When she hands him the coffee mug, he says, “Never had a mission go right in Poland. I guess this one wasn’t any different.”

“You’ve had worse ones, though.”

“Probably.” He stares at the coffee, instead of drinking it. “There was one where we had to break a man out of a concentration camp. A scientist, like today. Someone who worked with Dr. Erskine, before—before. We didn’t know a lot about them at the time, the camps. Hitler—Hitler kept them quiet. Most of the German population couldn’t even imagine they existed, though I’m still not sure if it was because they didn’t actually know, or they just didn’t want to. The Nazis put him in the ovens an hour before we made the drop, but we didn’t know that, so we went in anyway. And it was—”

He stops. Maria sips at her coffee, and takes the stool next to him. Rogers is quiet again, for so long she thinks he might be done talking. Then he clears his throat. “Usually Peggy had her own assignments. She came with us, for this one. I don’t remember why. I think Phillips was getting sick of arguing with her. There were a lot of missions that she wanted to join that he wouldn’t let her go on, until the Howling Commandoes started to make a name for themselves.”

“Because she was a woman?”

Rogers lifts his mug in a salute. “Even Phillips, sometimes. But this one she came with us. We were nearly caught. She hauled our asses out of there, but Gabe was creased in the head. We had to hide in the woods, nearby. I think if it had been a POW camp the Nazis would have cut the forest down, but since it was Jews and Romani people and everyone else they wanted dead, all the starving and the helpless, they didn’t even think about it.” He curls his fingers around the cup. “I slipped up. A guard saw me. We thought the corridor would be empty, we’d heard from one of our spies inside, but there was another guard that we didn’t notice, didn’t know about. He was the one who shot at Gabe. Caught me too, with a knife.” He traces his finger along the meat where his shoulder and neck collide. There’s no mark. “Gabe was bleeding pretty bad. We had to carry him out. And I tried to help cover the retreat, but Buck, he dragged me away. We didn’t know she was alive until we all made it out into the woods.”

Maria doesn’t know what to say. She wets her lips. “Were they soul mates too?”

It’s the first time she’s said the word since their conversation in the cafeteria, and it smacks him like a wet fish. Rogers jumps a little, gives her a sideways look. “Who?”

“Carter and Barnes.”

“Oh.” He shakes his head. “No. They were close friends. She was always really careful never to show preference, really, with the Commandoes—we were all a team, we all tried to do that—but I think out of all of them he was her favorite.” His lips quirk. “They gave each other so much shit. Bucky would try to make her blush, and she never did. She had brothers, too.”

“How many?”

“Two, or so she said. One older, one younger. She said the older one was useless and the younger one _lacked conviction_. Whatever that’s supposed to mean. She didn’t talk about them all that much.”

Maria sips her coffee, and realizes she forgot to put sugar in it. She doesn’t, usually, at work, but still. This is her home, and drinking bitter coffee barefoot at her kitchen counter is…odd. “I met her once. Director Carter.”

Rogers stills so fast it’s as if she’s frozen him in ice again. “Really.”

“Only once. She retired before I came on to SHIELD, but when she was well enough, she’d come to the swearing-in ceremonies at the academies. Usually she didn’t attend the after-parties, but this one she did.” A tiny woman who had seemed much larger, she thinks, with hair still in neat curls, and electric-red lipstick. “I didn’t attend the Academy, really, since I was a transfer from the armed forces—only one year instead of four—but I still had to go to all the ceremonies, and I remember thinking that even at nearly a century, she still looked at everyone as if she _knew_ she could break their spines with one hand, and was just trying to figure out whether or not she _should_.”

There’s a choking sound from Rogers. He covers his mouth, quickly, and looks away. She’s not sure if it’s a laugh, or something else.

“She called all the female recruits to the side of the room. I thought she was going to give us this speech about how we were unique to our sex, about—about how we should ignore any shit that the male recruits would give us, pretend they wouldn’t treat us like so much tits and ass. I had some officers in the Marines do that for me, once. But she just waited until we were all circled around her and said, _if anyone ever acts as if you’re lesser, I give you free and clear permission to put them on their arses._ ”

Rogers makes the noise again, and looks away from her. Maria doesn’t know what else to say, or even if she _should_ say anything else, so she presses her lips tight together and applies herself to her coffee for a while. It takes him a few minutes before he manages to get himself under control again. When he looks at her, his eyes are a bit damp, but he’s smiling. And for some reason, that _hurts_.

“She’d love you, I think,” he says. And in that moment, Maria realizes that she’s not just been playing with fire. She’s being burned.

.

.

.

“I thought I told you to check yourself, Rogers,” says Nat one day, perched on the edge of a weight machine and watching as he lifts.

“Check myself in what?”

She just looks at him. It’s been three weeks since the Poland mission, and she’s finally returned from wherever she goes where she feels less human, less _Nat_ and more _Natalia_. She’s changed her hair again, from wavy to straight, bangs swept neatly away from her forehead. Steve heaves the weight back onto the rack (it’s heavy even by his standards) and sits up, ignoring the way sweat slides down the back of his neck. “If you’re implying something—”

“I’m not _implying_ anything. I’m observing fact.”

“You’re _supposing_ fact. That’s different.”

Her lips curl. “If you say so.”

“Nothing is happening, Natasha.”

“Really?” Steve stands, and she copies him, hand on one hip, ignoring the way Rumlow is following her with his eyes. He’s not all that fond of Rumlow if he’s going to be totally honest. He _trusts_ Rumlow, sure. But he doesn’t like Rumlow. “You should start dating, then.”

“One thing does not lead to the other,” Steve says, and hides his face in the towel. Because _Christ_ , when Nat has a bone…

“Of course one thing leads to the other.” She flips off a few of the other strikers without looking at them. How she knows they were staring at her ass, he has no idea. Natasha _always_ knows. “If there’s nothing going on, put yourself back out there. It’s been long enough. You said yourself that Carter encouraged it.”

He regrets ever mentioning Peggy in front of Natasha. But it had seemed odd to talk about it with Hill, especially considering—well, considering _everything_ —and Barton is…not the type to discuss these things with. ( _You can give the world so much more than you know, Steve,_ Peggy had said, and her fingers had been curled just as tight around his as they had done during the War. _You just need to let yourself. Don’t worry about me. Be happy with the chances you have._ ) “When do I have time to date?”

“C’mon.” She smiles. “You’re not always saving the world.”

“No, just cleaning up after Fury’s mistakes.”

“Come _on,_ Rogers. It’s not as bad as you make it sound.” Nat hums. “Too scared no one will want to date an old man?”

“Did they teach you that smart mouth in Russia or is it just natural?”

“American prudery amuses me,” Nat says, deadpan. “What’s your type, then? Other than _soul mate_.”

“We’re not talking about this.”

“Don’t be a spoilsport.”

“Don’t you have a meeting? Or a lunch date? Possibly a truck full of mercenaries to scare shitless?”

“You,” she says, “are a fun-wrecker.”

“That is my official title, yes.”

“Put it on your list.” She waggles her fingers at him as she leaves the gym. “Think about it, Rogers!”

“The hell’s Scarlett O’Hara on about, Cap?” Rumlow asks as he passes. Steve shakes his head.

“You don’t want to know.”

.

.

.

Her phone buzzes at about three (AM, not PM; she’s working late again) and for a few minutes, Maria doesn’t look at it. She’s waiting on a report from a SHIELD asset in Monaco, and it’s distracting. When she does look, though, she’s glad she waited until she was mostly finished, because her focus? Entirely wiped, after.

_Tell Nat to stop bothering me about dating, it’s getting overwhelming._

She stares at the screen for a while, because _what._ First of all, it’s very middle school. (She wonders, for a moment, if Stark stole Rogers’s cell phone—but no, Stark’s in Manhattan, and Rogers hasn’t been back to visit in months, so far as she knows.) Secondly, just. _What._

Maria taps her pen against her desk, and then types, _I didn’t know she was doing that at all._

 _I think it’s because Barton’s away. She doesn’t have anyone to toy with._ There’s a pause. Then her phone buzzes again. _I don’t understand why she thinks I have time. Or any of us have time._

Something in her unwinds, a little. He’s not asking her for permission. He’s venting, which is a relief. (And why the hell is she relieved?) _I think Natasha has a different definition of personal time than other people do._

_I’m not about to inflict Steve Rogers, Captain America and Avenger, on some unsuspecting baby agent. Or neighbor. Or barista._

_If you pretend to play along, she might lose interest eventually._

_Possibly._ There’s another pause. _Even if I had time, which I don’t, I’m not looking for anything like that. She’s assuming things._

 _Nat’s good at that_ , she types, or starts to, but then her phone goes off. It’s Fury, his mouth crooked and unhappy-looking in that solely Fury-ish way. Her fingers start tingling uncomfortably. “Hill.”

“Sir.” She leans back in her chair, glad that she hasn’t taken her hair out of its bun yet. “Something happen?”

“We have an 0-8-4 just south of Albany. I need you there yesterday.”

“Do we know its point of origin?”

“Possibly Asgardian. No way to tell, because I don’t have anyone on the scene.”

“Understood,” she says, and he winks out. There’s no excess chatter with Fury. It’s soothing. She taps her pen against the desk again, and then turns back to her phone.

_If you ignore it, she’ll get stubborn. Play along as best you can. I won’t be back for a few days._

_OK_. She’s almost done packing up her things and making the call to the flight hangar when her phone buzzes one last time. _Be safe._

Maria stares at the screen for a full thirty seconds. Then she turns her phone off, and leaves it in her desk drawer.

.

.

.

“You know, I’m getting a little tired of being Fury’s janitor.”

“Relax, it’s not that complicated.”

.

.

.

“This is Hill.”

“I need you here in DC. Deep shadow conditions.”

.

.

.

There’s a point when they’re in Fury’s bunker when he looks at her sidelong and sees that same brittle, dry-eyed Maria Hill he remembers from right after her mother died, and the enormity of it all hits him, the fact that SHIELD is her whole world and she’s just told him to tear it down, and it hits him in the face all at once that what he’s seeing when she looks at him isn’t wariness anymore, it’s _trust_ , absolute, and his words are tingling on his ribs—

.

.

.

“Cap, get out of there.”

“Fire now.”

She’s not prepared for how much that hurts. It shouldn’t hurt _this much_. She feels as though someone’s just gutted her and it shouldn’t hurt like that, it shouldn’t, and no matter how much they hate what they’re supposed to be he can’t just ask her to kill him, like she _could_ , like he’s nothing to her when he’s not, and she bottoms out like a bad engine, her whole brain skitters, _but no, but you’re not supposed to die, but you can’t ask me to sign your death warrant, not when—_

—and her train of thought jumps the track because _what does that mean_ —

— _but you’re not supposed to leave, not now—_

“—but Steve—”

“ _Do it_ ,” Captain America tells her, and she does, but it feels like everything she never, ever wanted to feel, and she _hates_ him for that, she hates it, and her collarbone is burning, her throat is _burning_ —

.

.

.

That’s the first time she says his first name and it’s twisted that it’s when he’s about to die, because this is Peggy all over again, this is the War all over again, and _Bucky’s alive, Bucky Bucky Bucky,_ but the way she says it is as if—

.

.

.

She finally catches him without either of his shadows—Falcon, she tells herself, Falcon and the Widow—two days after he’s checked out of the hospital. Even better, she catches him by surprise, standing alone by the old SSR memorial wall with his hands pressed close against his sides. It’s probably the only reason why she gets right up in his face before he can stop her, and punches him as hard as she can in the jaw.

Rogers doesn’t go down—she doubts that even with all her training she could put him on the ground through sheer force, he’s just not built for it—but his head snaps to the side. He stumbles back, hands raised, but she’s made her point. “ _Jesus_ , Hill,” he says, and she flexes her screaming fingers. It feels like she’s fractured one of the smaller bones. “What the hell was that for?”

“If you ever,” she says, “make me do something like that again, I swear to god, I _will_ shoot you.”

He rubs his jaw with the back of his hand. There’s blood pebbling up on his lip. “Thought that’s what I asked you to do.”

“I didn’t say I would kill you. I just said I would shoot you.” She narrows her eyes. “ _Don’t_ make me do it again, Rogers.”

Rogers just looks at her. Her hand throbs. The moment stretches too long. _You scared me,_ she nearly says, and bites her tongue. _You asked me to kill you and I don’t think I can do that._ _I’ve never been that scared about someone else before and I don’t want it to happen ever again._ Then he bows his head, watching her through his eyelashes. Something about the movement makes her hair stand on end, and she’s not entirely certain why.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Good.” She opens her hand, closes it into a fist again. Maria steps back. She’ll need to get this looked at down in medical; she doesn’t want a broken hand, not right now. “Tell Wilson he needs to stop pretending that he’s not homeless. There are a few safe houses in New York he can use, if he’s planning on sticking around.”

He’s still watching her with an odd look on his face. Rogers swipes the blood off his mouth (he doesn’t even have the decency to get a bloody nose, the bastard) and wipes it away on his jeans. He opens his mouth and closes it again, pressing his lips tight together.

“What?”

“Nothing.” He rocks back and forth on his toes. “No, wait.”

“I’m doing nothing else,” she says, very dryly, because there’s the relief again, and it’s making her ridiculous. Rogers snorts, and then straightens, looking at her straight on.

“If I were to ask you to come with me,” he says, “to look for him. Would you?”

The world cracks open. Maria searches his face until she can’t manage it anymore, and then she looks away. There’s a tangle of _something_ underneath her sternum, something she doesn’t want to look at too closely but tastes almost like—almost like envy. She goes with the safe answer when she can’t justify keeping quiet any longer. “Maybe. After—after I get my life together.”

He’s shifted just slightly closer when she looks back at him, not enough to be invasive, but enough that she notices. “Okay.”

“Okay,” Maria says again, and turns away. She stops at the threshold of the stairwell. Rogers hasn’t moved. “By the way,” she adds, “you did a good job.”

He blinks. “What?”

“Don’t get me wrong.” She cocks her hip, tilts her head. “It was the stupidest, most reckless thing I’ve ever seen. But you did well.”

The smile that spreads across his face is slow and viscous as honey, and it makes her skin creep in a way that’s—not entirely unpleasant. “Glad I meet your approval,” he says, and she gets the hell out of there before she does something really stupid. What that stupid something would be, she has no idea. But she can feel it sneaking up on her, like a cat about to pounce.

 _—you can’t ask me to sign your death warrant, not when_ — 

_Not when what, Maria?_

.

.

.

Nat finds him three days after Fury’s funeral with the file, and kisses his cheek. Sam is close behind him, steady. Then Nat blinks, and looks again, and there’s a sad glint to the smile clinging to the edge of her mouth.

“I thought I told you to stop being a romantic,” she says.

Steve shrugs. “I don’t think I could stop if I tried, Romanoff.”

“Someone wanna enlighten me?” Sam says, but Nat shakes her head.

“I’m not touching that one with a ten foot pole. You’ll figure it out.”

“Y’all suck,” Sam says, but he’s laughing.

His mark is tingling again. Steve presses the file between his arm and ribcage, and pretends that it isn’t.

.

.

.

Apparently, she _is_ stupid, because for a while after the HYDRA incident, she sincerely considers just never speaking to Steve Rogers, ever, ever again.

Obviously that’s impossible. But really, she considers it. She knows exactly how she would manage it. She doesn’t have a job, now that SHIELD has fallen. She could very easily disappear, and Rogers would never be able to find her. (“Stay with them,” Fury tells her, when the helicopter has landed and Captain Rogers has been found. “I’m dead. You’re not. SHIELD is gone, but we’re still here, and they’re gonna need you to keep them on track.”

“What about rebuilding SHIELD?”

“Coulson can do that. Your job is more important. The world needs the Avengers more than it will ever need SHIELD, or whatever it became. Protecting that—that’s in your hands.”

She still feels like she’s been passed over, but Nick is gone, and so there’s no way she can sock him in the jaw for leaving her with this, what feels like second-best.)

She could vanish and Rogers would never find her, but that—and this thought slips into her head after she’s had enough whiskey to feel like it’d be a damn good idea to cry—would be exactly what he asked _her_ to do. Granted, the circumstances are different (civilian morals, not soldier morals, _remember that the ends justify the means, Hill_ ) (they don’t really, not to her, not anymore, not after Phil and Fury and Rogers, goddamn Rogers and his reckless streak of martyrdom) but the feeling it rouses, that’s the same. If she leaves, she’ll be abandoning the only real friendship she’s had in what must be more than a decade, and she refuses to sink to his level.

She will admit, though: punching him in the face? _Extremely_ satisfying. Even if she had to wear a brace afterwards.

(He’d looked almost exactly the same as when he and Nat and Wilson had been in the back of the van, tied up, waiting to die, and he’d said _even when I had nothing, I had Bucky_ , and she’d felt such a surge of—she doesn’t even know what, fury and agony and _jealousy,_ for god’s sake, she’s jealous of Bucky Barnes, because Bucky Barnes is alive, Bucky Barnes is the Winter Soldier, Bucky Barnes is her soul mate’s soul mate, but he’s not even her soul mate, really, she doesn’t _want_ a soul mate, and _you can’t ask me to sign your death warrant, not when—)_

But (and it takes another half of the whiskey bottle to get to this point; she’s always done her best introspection when trashed out of her skull, which is why she never, ever gets drunk) the line between _friendship_ and the strange, buzzing feeling in her soulmark is getting thinner and thinner. And she doesn’t _want_ a soul mate. She doesn’t want him that way and never has. She’s not blind to the fact that he’s pretty (and the man is pretty, she will say this) but she’s been determined for years (and it has been for years, nearly two and a half, now) that there will be absolutely no romantic or sexual interludes between them, and so she’s just never let herself notice it.

Apparently she forgot to include emotional interludes in that list, she thinks, staring at her glass of whiskey. Emotional interludes should have been the most important. She should have remembered those.

Her mother, when she’d been alive, had always called Maria _contrary._ She’s not sure how it applies to her strict anti-soul mate policy (is it contrary to know what you want and go after it? No. Unless you’re Marissa Hill, apparently.) but the term had stuck to her back like a footprint all through elementary and middle school. _Mistress Mary, quite contrary_ in particular clung to her in the most terrible way. She figured out in high school that _contrary_ is just another word for _bitch_ , like _ambitious_ or _bossy_ or even _dedicated_ , so she’d started ignoring everyone who’d pushed her off into a box because she didn’t fit the one they’d already had built for her. (Daughter of a chaplain, mother a professor of English literature, brothers all cubicle workers or failures or both, so far from the military it must have been like a slap in the face.) _Lesbian_ and _dyke_ had been thrown in when she’d decided, at twelve, that it was simpler to exist with a pixie cut rather than braids, and cut all her hair off herself. (Actually now that she thinks about it, her dad probably still thinks she’s a lesbian.) _Mistress Mary, quite contrary, doesn’t want her soul mates._ She doesn’t want to be defined by someone else’s expectations; she’s _never_ wanted to be defined that way; and she’s met both her soul mates and no one else even knows.

Except maybe Nat. She’s pretty sure Nat knows about both of them. But that’s Nat, so she doesn’t count.

Her brain is misting. She leans back against the edge of the couch, closing her eyes. Something on the floor (a book, maybe) is digging into her ass. What the hell, she thinks. She’s contrary. If _contrary_ can actually mean what she is. But _contrary_ doesn’t mean _start having awkward feelings for the person you have already rejected as your soul mate._

Unless that _is_ what contrary means and she’s just stupid.

Her phone buzzes. It’s Stark, of all people. She watches it until the light goes out, and the tone for a voicemail goes off. Three minutes later, it rings again. Then ninety seconds. Then forty-five.

He’s dropped down to calling her every ten seconds before she finally picks up.

“ _What_ , Stark?”

“Guess who’s having a shit week,” Stark says. “Answer: it’s not me, it’s you.”

She knocks her head against the arm of the chair. “What do you want?”

“You’re assuming I want something from you? Sorry, I don’t do that anymore. Not even for you. Although, I might for Beyoncé. Hell, Pep might join me for Beyoncé.”

“I would join you for Beyoncé,” says Pepper Potts, deeply amused. “Hello, Maria.”

“Hello.” She’s not slurring her words, and is very proud of this. “What do you want?”

“So unfriendly. Really, Agent, you might want to—”

“Tony, shut up.”

There must be something strange about how she says it, because Tony Stark, to her immense shock, actually shuts up.

“We wanted to call and see how you were,” says Pepper, softly. “We saw you on the news. Natasha, too. Tony flew down to see Steve, but he couldn’t find either of you.”

“Because I didn’t look for either of them.”

“Liar.” Pepper clears her throat. “Anyway. We wanted to see how you were doing. So I thought we’d call.”

“Let’s see.” She squeezes her eyes shut. “I don’t have a job. My workplace had a helicarrier go through it. It turns out—and I knew this, or at least suspected some of this, ever since Poland—”

“What the hell does Poland have to do with anything?”

“Shut up, Tony. I suspected at least some of this was going on since Poland, but there was no proof. And because we couldn’t prove it without destroying SHIELD entirely I had to engineer a supervillain’s masterwork of sadism to shoot down Captain Fucking America, who is the _biggest fucking idiot_ , and should _not be allowed to exist_ , and who I never wanted to fucking meet in the fucking first place, and Fury left me to keep the Avengers together when the only thing that was _keeping_ them together was SHIELD, and this whole thing is so _fucking_ stupid I could blow up the world and not even care. I wouldn’t even _care_. _That_ is how I am doing.”

There’s a long silence from the other end of the phone.

“Tony,” says Pepper. “Disconnect, please.”

“She’s my new favorite, though. She said Steve was a fucking idiot.”

“Get off the call, now.”

Tony gets off the call.

“Steve’s third soul mate,” Pepper says. “The mark they found after they found him in the ice. The soul mate no one could figure out. It’s you, isn’t it?”

Maria says nothing. For a long time, neither does Pepper. Then Pepper sighs, and Maria thinks of Pepper Potts’s visible soulmark, shackled around her throat like a choker: _are you supposed to be a PA or did Obie send me an expensive hooker in disguise again?_ “I see.”

“I don’t.”

“You two being soul mates? It explains a lot.”

“It shouldn’t.” Maria sets her glass of whiskey down. Suddenly, she doesn’t want to drink anymore. “What does it explain?”

“Movements and gestures.” She clicks her tongue against her teeth. “Tones.”

“ _Tones_?”

“Maria.” Pepper sounds—she sounds _amused_. “My soul mate is one of the most intellectually gifted men on the planet, and yet at the same time I’ve never met anyone so emotionally awkward as Tony Stark. I might not be good at many things—”

“You are good at all the things,” Maria tells her quite seriously. Maria is also quite drunk at this point, but that doesn’t make it any less true.

“Well, thank you. Regardless, there are one or two things I am _very_ good at, and one of them in particular is reading people. You’re a spy, you’re the same way. Besides, it was nothing that anybody else could see, except maybe for Natasha. And I’m not about to tell Tony, so don’t worry about that.”

Because that would just make her life better, having Tony Stark know she’s _Captain America’s soul mate._ “I don’t want soul mates,” Maria says. “I’ve never wanted a soul mate. I don’t _need_ a soul mate. Everyone thinks I _need_ soul mates to be—to be a person, but I don’t. I never have.”

“You don’t need a soul mate to be a person, Maria.” Pepper sighs. “You don’t even need to get along with your soul mate. Sometimes I wonder if soul mates are arbitrary, if our genetics just chooses someone random and we make ourselves fit. I certainly wouldn’t have chosen either of my soul mates, if I’d had the chance. Whether you believe it’s fate or destiny or a genetic mishap or just random chance, soul mates are just people, in the end. And from what little I’ve been able to gather, it sounds like that’s exactly how you and Steve decided to be to each other. People who know each other and spend time together, at work or outside it, without any expectation of anything more.”

She can’t quite decide if this is easing her nerves, or just making them worse.

“Anyway, what I’m saying is you don’t need to think of Steve as your soul mate to care about him, or be angry with him for nearly getting himself killed.” There’s that amused tone, again, like she’s seen something funny that Maria can’t make out. “Unless you’re angry about him doing something else.”

“I don’t—” Saying this is harder than it should be. “I don’t—giving someone the—if he _is_ my—what he is. Then if I—if I _say_ that, it’s—”

“Permanent?”

“Yes, that.” Goddamn her drunkenness. “And—and it means that he—it means that people will think—no. It means that—it means that I’m not in control of myself. Anymore. People—people think of soul mates as one person, not—not two people, or three, or whatever. It’s—you’re not an individual, anymore. And—and if I _say_ that, if—if I say it’s okay for him to be that, then he has—he’d have power over me. And I don’t—want that.”

Pepper’s quiet again. “You think that Steve would use it against you?”

“No.” The answer comes so fast she blinks. “No, I don’t. But I want—I want to be the only person who can affect my—myself. My feelings. I don’t want anyone else to be able to—hurt me, the way it did when—”

— _but, Steve—_

“Ah, I see.” She draws it out, like, _ahhhh, I see._ “Having a soul mate— _being_ a soul mate—that doesn’t change you fundamentally. Who gives a damn what other people think? Certainly not you. The only person whose business it is, is you, and your soul mate’s. That’s it. If you let your worry about what other people think of it affect your relationship, no matter if it’s platonic or romantic, you’ll regret it.”

 _The whole point of my job is understand what people think_ , she nearly says. But she doesn’t have a job anymore. “Oh.”

“As for the other piece, that’s up to you. What you should probably ask yourself, though, is whether or not you’re more frightened of letting someone have power over you, or of being hurt. Because with soul mates—and I imagine especially with a soul mate like Steve—you have to remember that they’re giving just as much power to you as you are to them, especially once the bond is forged. So whatever control or influence or _power_ you’re frightened of Steve having over you, you’ll have just as much of it over him. And since it’s Steve, he won’t just give you half. If he decides he wants to pursue this, he will give you _all_ of himself. Having that sort of power over someone—that’s even more frightening than giving it to someone else.”

Maria can’t think of a single thing to say.

“If you remember this tomorrow,” Pepper says, “then you’ll always have a place with Stark Industries, Maria. I feel like we could use someone with your talent for organization here in New York.”

.

.

.

He’s always disappointed in himself when he remembers how long it took him, after the Triskelion, to notice that Hill was avoiding him.

She’s never overly effusive, but this is different. This is a Hill caught between the corporal who never wanted to be near him, and the woman in the Ann Arbor sweatshirt that he only ever sees at two or three or four in the morning, the one who lets her hair down sometimes and is almost always in reading glasses because she has too many files to get through them all even if she stays in the Triskelion for a full twenty-four hours. (The Triskelion is gone, though, and there are shattered images in his head of Bucky trapped under a girder, Steve Rogers with a broken cheekbone and a swollen eye looking up at him, flickering between himself and Bucky and knowing _you’re real you’re here you’re real—_ )

(The wall’s back up in his head between his eyes and Bucky’s, but at least now he knows there are cracks, because sometimes he can catch images flickering through.)

But SHIELD has fallen, and everyone who’s been proven to not be HYDRA is scrambling for a new life, a new career. Agent 13 (“Sharon,” she corrects, shaking his hand once, firmly, and he’s still not sure if he likes knowing the truth more than the friendliness of his nurse neighbor) is at the CIA now, or so they tell him. Fury, of course, has vanished, and he doubts that any of them will see the man again until there’s a large-enough threat to need the Avenger. Nat’s gone back into deep cover in Eastern Europe somewhere (that or Vietnam; she’d mentioned Vietnam once or twice and he’s pretty sure it’s her favorite country in the world other than Russia just because of that) and of course Barton’s holed up in his apartment building in Bed-Stuy licking his wounds and having a game of snap-and-snarl with Kate Bishop. Hill herself has been absorbed into Stark Industries, which for some reason confused a lot of people they don’t know, and even a lot of people that they do.

(“She was Fury’s right hand,” says Barton, lining up his shot with the pool cue. “What the hell is she doing working in human resources?”

“She’s good at it,” Steve replies, watching as Barton knocks two balls into the pocket, and misses a third. “She likes working for Pepper.”

“But she’s an _agent_.”

“She enjoys it. What’s the problem with that?”

“I didn’t expect Hill to be one of the ones to tap out and go back to civvie life, that’s all.”

Something unruly and angry curls in Steve’s throat. “Leave it, Barton,” he snaps, and Barton backs off immediately, looking unnerved. It’s only later that Steve realizes he’s never spoken to Clint Barton that way, especially not about Maria Hill. He’d be kicking himself if not for the fact that he’s settled in for the long haul of unrequited everything, and it doesn’t particularly matter since SHIELD’s not around to bother him about it anyway.)

He’s seen her since they both moved to New York, he knows he has. He’s been out of the city more often than not, chasing leads with Sam, but whenever he lets her know that he’s in town she asks to meet with him to talk about how his hunt is going, to let him know how the training of the new agents is going. (“They can’t be SHIELD,” she says, swirling her iced tea with a straw without looking at him. “But if the Avengers Initiative is going to continue, then you need back-up. All of you do.” And god, he knew before how integral she was to the process of developing the Avengers, but it’s only then that he figures out how much they need _her_ , because without her they’d probably fall apart into chaos.) She’s behaving normally, or at least, he thinks she is. One night, though, maybe a month and a half after the collapse of SHIELD, a month and a half after the Winter Soldier, he gets a text from Pepper Potts that says, _Please come save Maria from herself, she has no reason to be here for twenty-four hours at a time regardless of how many issues the board has brought up with performance_.

He stops dead in the middle of a Brooklyn crosswalk, just for a moment. Pepper Potts is not exactly on the list of people he would have expected to a) know his phone number and b) know that he’d once spent a great deal of time dragging Hill away from her desk every time she seemed too trigger-happy. Considering she’s both Tony Stark’s soul mate and also rules half of the United States economic system singlehandedly, though, perhaps he shouldn’t be surprised.

It’s only the honk of a taxi that gets him moving again. Steve replies with a quick _thank you_ and catches a cab to a Starbucks two blocks from Avengers’ Tower.

He’s never been in this part of the tower, before. Aside for the hallway lights and one or two cubicles (though they’re less cubicles and more artsy workstations, which he likes) the whole place is dark. Hill’s new office is all glass, a luxury reserved for those who no longer have to worry about getting sniped in the head. It means that when he pauses just out of her line of sight, he can tell that she’s kicked off her high heels, and there’s a pencil stuck in her hair that she’s obviously forgotten about. She looks _tired,_ as if she’s only just now set down a weighty world. Something digs nails into his skin, and twists. When he knocks on the door, she actually jumps.

“Rogers.” The dismantling and reassembling of her expression is so fast he nearly misses it, but there’s a straightness to her spine that was missing when she thought she was alone. _She’s pretending_ , he thinks, and bites down hard on the inside of his lip. _She’s exhausted and pretending not to be._ “I didn’t know you were here.”

“Pepper sent me a SOS.” Her polite interest doesn’t flicker, but he thinks there’s an odd stiffness in her shoulders that wasn’t there before, like she’s bracing for something. “Said you’ve been here since last night?”

“Work wasn’t done.” She looks down at her papers again “Still isn’t, actually.”

That’s a cue if he’s ever heard one. Steve ignores it, and the scowl she gives him when he shuts her office door behind him and drops down in the chair opposite her would make him want to turn and run if he hadn't long since been immunized. The first two buttons of her shirt are undone, and he can make out a hint of silver against her collarbone. Against his ribs, his soulmark stings with—something. Not warmth or cold, but some twisted fusion of the two. At the same time, Hill flinches like she’s been pricked with a needle.

“ _What_ , Rogers.”

“Something’s happened. Hasn’t it?”

Hill curls her fingers around her pen, and then yanks the mechanical pencil out of the knot at the top of her head. “A lot of things have happened,” she says, her voice light and confused and extraordinarily fake to anyone who actually knows her. “The destruction of SHIELD being one of them.”

“Hill.”

Her eyes narrow. “Rogers.”    

“Please don’t make me guess.”

“There’s nothing to guess about.”

“Which is why you’ve been avoiding me,” he says, and they blink simultaneously, Hill because she’s trying to keep her shield up, Steve because—oh. She _has_ been avoiding him. And he’s actually an idiot.

“I haven’t,” she says.

“That’s what this is.” He cocks an eyebrow. “You not avoiding me.”

“I do have a life, Rogers.”

“Clearly, since you’re still in a building owned by Tony Stark at one—nearly two in the morning.”

She blows air out her nose, and says nothing.

“Hill. Come on.” He props his elbows on his knees. “What’s happened?”

“ _Nothing_.” She grits her teeth. “Nothing’s happened. Maybe I’m just busy.”

“Building our back-up team?”

“You’d be surprised how much effort goes into keeping Val de Fontaine out of my private computer network.” 

Steve snorts. Still, he stands. “Hill. Please?”

The look she gives him then is utterly indecipherable. Like she’s trying to decide where would be best to stab him, to cause the least amount of pain. Or where to stab herself. Then she sighs, again, and he knows she’s won. “Fifteen minutes.”

“Five, and that’s generous. Whatever’s there can wait until tomorrow morning.”

“Anyone ever tell you that you’re one bossy son of a bitch?”

“Multiple people, actually.” He shoves his hands into his pockets. “I’ll wait at the end of the hall.”

Even two years down the road, Midtown is still mostly in pieces. Hill doesn’t protest when he herds her into a cab and directs the driver not to her apartment (he realizes with a shock he doesn’t know where that is, which is strange, because it’s been a touchstone for the past year, knowing that) but to a bar he knows in the nicer part of Chelsea. Hill props her chin in her hand and stares out the window, almost entirely silent.

“You know,” she says, about halfway there, “if I was avoiding you, I wouldn’t be in this cab right now.”

“That would have worked better if you’d said it _before_ testing how fast you can get the door open.”

She wrinkles her nose. “That’s elementary vehicular safety, Rogers.”

In the front seat, the driver muffles a snort.

The bar is called Rehab, which doesn’t at all fit the interior; it’s small, especially for a Chelsea bar, but it’s quiet, and the bartender has worked out when to be chatty and when not. Tonight is definitely not, Steve thinks, watching as Hill curls closer into herself, around her drink. Another time, maybe, but definitely not tonight.

“Are you going to interrogate me or ply me with alcohol?” she says once they’ve settled. “Because you’re not gonna have much luck either way.”

“You sound like Nat.”

“I talked to her yesterday.” There are rings under her eyes. “She was—very wry. She’s always wry when she’s pretending she’s not worried, and it always rubs off.” She runs a hand over her jaw. “Besides, if I’m not SHIELD anymore, then there’s no reason to be mysterious all the time. I can say what I damn well please.”

There’s an ache in her voice that he recognizes, because it’s the same ache he hears in his own when he talks about the Howling Commandoes. “You’re always going to be SHIELD, Hill.”

She tips her head towards the TV, where the news headline reads _SHIELD: INTELLIGENCE OR THEFT?_ “Being part of SHIELD? Not the best thing right now.”

“It doesn’t matter what HYDRA did. None of that makes you anything less than what you were.”

“Maybe to other SHIELD agents, no.”

He has to fight off the urge to pinch his nose. “What’s going on with you, Hill? You seem…off.”

Hill huffs, looks away from him. “I’m tired, that’s all. What are you even doing in the city right now? I would have thought you’d be out in Slovakia, or whatever country you were crawling through. Seems a bit disingenuous to pause the hunt so soon.”

 _You want to try and pick a fight, Hill? Not happening._ “The trails have gone cold again. Which doesn’t surprise me. It—it hurts, but it’s not surprising. He’s always known how to cover his tracks.”

Hill says nothing. She sips at her drink.

“What happened, Hill?”

“Seems like something’s always happening.” She closes her eyes. “People coming back from the dead. Shady organizations hiding in plain sight. Aliens, robots. I’m expecting gigantic fire-breathing slugs, next.”

“When they show up, I will blame you,” he says, and Hill coughs on a laugh. “Is it something with the recruits? Lewis and de Fontaine seem like they know what they’re getting into.”

“Sometimes they know too much about what they’re getting into.” She glances at the bartender, and lowers her voice. “They—they both know more about SHIELD than most recruits did, coming in. de Fontaine has a chip on her shoulder the size of a small continent, and Lewis is…scattered. Focused, but her energy spirals into different directions when it needs to be focused. They’re improving, but it’s a process.”

“So it’s not the recruits.”

“I keep telling you, _nothing is wrong_.”

“Don’t bullshit me, Hill.”

“I don’t have to tell you everything that happens in my life, Rogers.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Then what did you mean?”

Sometimes he just wants to _shake_ her. “Something is bothering you and fine, you don’t have to talk to me, but you shouldn’t have to keep it quiet, either.”

The noise she makes is indescribable. “Maybe having the organization I devoted my entire life to turn out to be some kind of—Nazi conspiracy was enough to shake me up a little bit, all right? Maybe learning that all the secrets I kept, all the things I lied about, to _everyone_ , could have been—were probably used in some sort of evil plot to take over the world was kind of overwhelming for a day or two. That doesn’t make me crazy. It makes me human.”

He thinks of some of those secrets, just for a second or two. Phil Coulson. (That has Fury all over it, though he thinks Hill might know. He hasn’t asked, because it doesn’t particularly matter.) Everything about Project Insight. Paperclip. Everything. Every part of it. And yeah. It makes sense. “You and Fury both suspected something like that was going on.”

“Fury suspected. He didn’t always tell me everything. I had some ideas, and—and when he asked me to help set up the bunker I thought maybe I was right, but I didn’t know. I didn’t have proof.” She meets his gaze. “The attack on Fury, the attacks on you, that was my proof. And I had no idea—I had _no_ idea how deep it went.”

“And then everything.”

“Yeah.” She blinks, slowly. “And then everything.”

 _Everything_ being Sam. _Everything_ being Bucky. _Everything_ being Armin Zola written in code, Nick Fury with tetrodotoxin and bullets in his chest cavity, a man with shaggy hair and a face that he’s known since before he can remember, mouth moving, _who the hell is Bucky_ — 

— _but, Steve_ , she’d said, and it’s still the first and only time she’s said his name, and he can’t help but feel like that means something very important—

“I’m sorry,” he says, finally. “If—if my asking you to help me made it worse.”

She blinks twice. Then something fades out of her, some fury or frustration or stiffness, and she smiles. It’s a bit crooked and small, but it’s still a smile. “Jesus, Rogers. Not everything that’s wrong with me has to be your fault.”

“This is, though.”

“I would rather you have burned SHIELD to the ground even more than we already did than still be working for an organization that has anything to do with HYDRA.” She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. “It’s—it’s not what I was expecting to do, but that doesn’t matter. I’m a grown-up. I can handle it.”

And this time, she seems to have crept closer to the truth. Steve rocks his beer bottle back and forth, thinking. “I meant it when I asked if you wanted to come with me. I could use your help.”

She freezes. Hill looks at him sidelong, half-wild, and _there_. That’s the issue. That’s what’s worrying her, or, at least, part of it. She licks her lips. “I didn’t think you’d actually want me there, if you found him.”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“Because he’s—you know. He’s your soul mate. That seems…very private.”

 _But you’re my soul mate too_ , he thinks, just for a moment. And she is. It’s not the same as it was with Bucky, before, and it’s certainly not the same as it was with Peggy even if it seems like it at first glance. There’s no point in comparing them, any of them. Where Bucky is open vivacity and raw energy (or he was, Steve doesn’t know if he’s still that way, if he can ever be that way again, but it doesn’t matter, really, not to him) and Peggy was steel and grit and determination, Hill is the moment before a knife strike, the silence of a midnight spent contentedly alone. They’re inherently different and inherently the same and inherently _his_ , and somehow he’s been marked with all three of them, and what seemed impossible before is now just—reality. Whatever’s bothering her, he wants to fix it. He doesn’t know if he can, exactly, but he wants to. And it might be very selfish (it _is_ , considering how clear she’d been about soul mates, about how much she _doesn’t want_ a soul mate) but he still wants her around. Even if they weren’t soul mates, he’s pretty sure he’d still want her around. She’s Hill.

“I’d still want you at my back,” he says, when he realizes he’s been silent for too long. Hill doesn’t seem to breathe, for a moment, just…observing him. Thinking. Then, slowly, she nods.

“Okay.”

.

.

.

She only goes along twice, in the year between SHIELD and Ultron.

The first time it’s to a small town in Belarus. Sam is ushering Lewis around n her first _actual_ mission (it’s strange to think that the intern from New Mexico, the one that Phil talked about with a slightly bemused tone like he wasn’t quite sure where the world went wrong, is now wandering through Eastern Europe chasing a lead on the Winter Soldier) and so it’s Rogers and herself that head to the itty-bitty town thirty minutes out of Hrodna. Rogers doesn’t speak Russian at all (he can’t get his mouth around the vowels, which makes Natasha laugh as hard as Maria has _ever_ seen Natasha laugh) so it’s Maria that leads them around. No one has seen or heard of a man with a metal arm. There is a woman, though, who talks about a man (“homeless, I think,” she says, but she tips her head towards the photo and adds, “maybe him,”) who stopped a pro-Russian activist from shooting her and her husband in the street as they’d been returning from a Ukranian separatist rally. “Three days ago. He didn’t say anything,” she continues, shifting uncomfortably when Rogers’s face goes cold. “He just took the gun and walked away. He seemed—he seemed very lost.”

“Thank you,” Maria says, “you’ve been very helpful,” and she hustles Rogers the hell out of there before he can do something stupid.

“He was _here_ ,” he says, when they’re in an alley a few blocks away. “And if he saved that woman—the Winter Soldier wouldn’t have done that.”

“He wouldn’t have.” He’s still pacing. Without thinking (she’s doing that more and more lately, not thinking around him, and it’s so goddamn dangerous but she _doesn’t think_ sometimes) she reaches out and catches his arm. “If you keep doing stalking around like that, we’re going to draw attention.”

He stops dead. The muscles of his arms are tense and unyielding under her palm. She doesn’t pull away. “He could be anywhere by now, if it was three days ago.”

“Why would he come here?” He pushes a thumb into his forehead. “I went through the file, there wasn’t anything on Belarus.”

“Not for the Red Room. We know HYDRA had him moved, frequently. We know from Nat that he was under Russian control for a while. The only files we have are from the Red Room, not from HYDRA. Maybe—maybe it was an undocumented op.”

“Doing _what?_ ” Rogers doesn’t pull away from her. “This town is—it’s tiny. If he’s remembering something that happened _here—_ ”

“The point isn’t _why_ he was here, but that he _was_ here.” She draws her hand back. “If we’re lucky, and he took the train, we can track him.”

They’re not lucky. She catches herself flexing her hand on the way out, over and over, like she’s seeking sensation. Maria pushes both her hands into her pockets, and doesn’t remove them again until they land in the States.

The second time they go to Kiev. Wilson’s with them, this time. Maria genuinely likes Wilson, and she can’t decide whether or not she should be surprised about it. She doesn’t like people easily. Still, there’s something about him that makes him understand why Rogers would turn to a man he’d known for a grand total of seventeen minutes for shelter in the storm.

They catch a single glimpse of Barnes, from a rooftop. He turns and looks right at them, _right_ at them, and next to her Rogers jerks, electrified. Then he’s gone, and no matter how hard they search, they can’t find him again. They stay for four whole days before they finally give up, though Rogers _swears_ he keeps catching glimpses of the Andriyivski Uzvis through Barnes’s eyes (and she has to reevaluate her knowledge of Rogers and his soul bonds, because if his connection with Barnes is to see through the man’s eyes, what would the others be, really, anyway—). When they finally start for home, they’re all exhausted, overcaffeinated, and entirely too grumpy for what little success they’ve had.

About halfway through the flight, though, Wilson drops down across from her in an empty chair, and looks at her. Maria glances up from her paperwork, and then back down again. Her pencil is itching in her hair. “What?”

“You brought Stark Industries paperwork on a flight to hunt down the Winter Soldier?”

“I do have a day job, Wilson.”

“Ouch,” he says, but he’s laughing. He does that a lot. “Very true. I used to have a day job, before this bozo. It was very soothing. The most I had to worry about was someone having a flashback when a car backfired.”

Judging from what she’s dug up about Wilson since the aftermath of SHIELD’s downfall, she doubts very much that that was the only thing he worried about. But that’s not the point. “It’s not all that much quieter than SHIELD,” she says, and highlights a line in the harassment report. “There are just fewer guns and more psychotic robots.”

(And when Ultron bursts out into the penthouse she thinks of this moment and wants to cry laughing because the _irony—_ )

“I’ll keep that in mind.” They both glance at Rogers, who’s asleep (or pretending to be) a few rows down. Then Wilson cocks an eyebrow at her. “Feels like I’ve heard a lot about you, last couple months.”

She doesn’t react. “Oh?” she says, and underlines another sentence.

“Almost as much as he talks about the Ice Cube Soldier.” Wilson knots his hands together, loosely. “You mind if I ask you something?”

“Is it about ice cubes?”

“You have another job, now. You managed to get away from the SHIELD fallout.” He jerks his head towards Rogers. “So why keep helping him out?”

“Technically, the Avengers are my job, too.”

“Yeah, but I don’t see you flying across the world for Tony Stark.” He stops. “Aside from like…a shareholder’s meeting or something.”

Maria clicks the highlighter pen a few times. Then she sets it aside. “He has a tendency to inspire loyalty in people.” She meets Wilson’s eyes. “You should know that much.”

“Yeah, there’s that.” He wavers, just for a moment, on the edge of _the_ question. The _friends or soul mate_ question. Then he veers away from it. “So. Captain’s orders?”

She realizes she’s highlighted the wrong line when she looks down at her page again. Maria swears to herself.

“Yeah,” she says. “Captain’s orders.”

When they disembark from the plane, later, Rogers touches his fingers to the small of her back. It’s not something that she’d notice, if it came from anyone else (though Maria is jealous of her personal space and always has been), but with him, she _feels_ it. And later, when she gets home, there’s a knock on her door, and on the other side she finds Steve Rogers with red eyes and an expression she can’t possibly begin to understand.

Maria doesn’t say anything. She steps aside, lets him in. She’s turning away to make coffee when he catches her wrist, and she snaps her gaze to his face. Rogers is shaking, and she wonders when, exactly, she earned the right to see that on him.

“I’m sorry.” His voice cracks. “I know—just—can I?”

Maria searches his eyes. Then she nods, once.

He smells like the rainstorm outside, like recycled air. Rogers doesn’t hold her too closely—leery of frightening her, she thinks—but he hides his face against her shoulder, and breathes.

She stands there with him, waiting until the trembling stops. She doesn’t ever mention it, but she does it, and that means everything.

.

.

.

The nightly ritual of ousting one or the other of them from their respective cubicles starts back up again over the winter. Steve doesn’t live in the Stark Tower (at least, not all the time); he has an old brownstone in Washington Heights that he actually likes quite a lot, and it’s pretty guaranteed to be a place where no one will look for Captain America. (People still get confused when he tells them he’s not in Brooklyn, and he doesn’t even try to explain how the onslaught of memories might destroy him.) Apparently being Fury’s second-in-command paid very well, because Hill has an apartment on the seventeenth floor of a very expensive building, four blocks from Stark Tower, and usually if they wind up anywhere outside of bars, it’s there. It’s similar to her place in DC, but it’s also different, because there’s more personal stuff, here. There are one or two photographs on the walls where there had been none, before. There’s a blanket. The furniture is slightly warmer, less utilitarian. Still, it’s more that Hill _lives_ here, rather than kips here for an hour or two. It’s a difference in image and feeling, not in knickknacks.

“If you could hang up your shield,” she asks one night, and she looks very vulnerable in the corner of her couch with her feet curled up underneath her and a few strands of hair falling out of her ponytail, like she’s finally hung up something of her own, “would you?”

“I don’t know,” Steve says, and she hums.

“Okay.”

She doesn’t ask again.

.

.

.

Lewis catches sight of her romantic mark one night during training, cocks an eyebrow behind her glasses, and says, “Bet you had some fun comments with that one.”

“You have no idea,” Maria says, and sweeps her feet out from under her. Lewis at least has the instincts to try and fall properly. She still lands hard on her ass. “Roll.”

Lewis rolls, dutifully. Her glasses are lopsided. “So did I, with mine,” she says, a bit breathlessly. Maria’s eyes dip to her wrists, to _can we perhaps talk about this later_ and _maybe when no one is shooting at us._ Lewis pops back up off the floor. “You wanna know what I think?”

“You’re going to tell me regardless.”

It’s not a no, and they both know it. Lewis pushes up her glasses. “Fuck the police, boss, do what you damn well want.”

It’s strange, but no matter how many other people have said it, it’s Lewis that starts to make her actually think it. 

.

.

.

After the bomb of Lewis’s soul mates ( _you didn’t see that coming?_ the kid says in the back of his head, and he kind of really wants to punch the little bastard in the jaw for that, no matter how pissed Lewis will be if he actually manages it) Steve slinks into a corner away from the main bulk of the party, desperate to find someplace quiet. It’s been a while since Tony has thrown one of his larger bashes, and even if he can handle machine gun fire and shouting soldiers with no problem at all, the chatter of crowds gets on his nerves.

He tries to slink away, anyway. Tony follows him.

“Agent Agent has loosened up,” he says. Tony looks slightly manic, like he’s gone for a week with no sleep again. Or, Steve decides, less than a week. A few days, maybe. His hair is sticking up like porcupine quills. Steve looks at his drink, and hopes Tony won’t notice he’s laughing.

“Agent Agent?”

“Agent Agent,” says Tony. “The hills are alive with the sound of gunfire. Or, conversely, _The Hills Have Eyes_ and they’re watching you.”

“Oh, Hill.”

“ _Oh, Hill_.” Tony rolls his eyes to the ceiling. “Do you know you collect sidekicks? It’s like watching a kid’s show. Sidekick here, sidekick there. Do you have one for every country you visit? Every era? Is it on purpose or just unintentional?”

“She’s not a sidekick.”

“Agent Agent is not a sidekick, I will give you that. Bird-Brain, on the other hand—”

“If Sam is a sidekick, what does that make you?”

“ _Burn_ ,” Tony says gleefully, and knocks Steve with his elbow. “You’re getting better, good. It was depressing mocking you when you didn’t mock back.”

“You’re babbling.”

“I have a train of thought which is beyond your comprehension, apple pie face.” Banner pauses as he passes them, shakes his head once, and then keeps going. _Bastard_ , Steve thinks. He could have at least been a decent distraction. “Namely that whatever stick she had in her ass? She’s either loosened it enough to behave like a human being or has decided to go around beating people with it.”

“That’s a reference, isn’t it.”

“Well, done, you’re improving.” He claps Steve on the back. “Anyway. Stick. Removal. What was the magic?”

“Maybe she just didn’t like you, before.”

“Meaning she likes me now? Awww, I should send her a note. _Dear Hill, I hear you like me, please circle, yes or no._ ” Tony jerks his head. “But Legolas Hawkass agrees. Agent Cheekbones has gone from Agent Cubed to just plain old Agent and no one can work out why.”

“And why do you think I would know?”

“Please. Captain. Patriotic light of my life. You are, hands down, the worst liar I have ever met, and that includes my chauffeur, who is named Happy. He is _named_ after his primary emotion. He is one of the Seven Dwarves, and he lies better than you. So c’mon. What’d they say back in the Stone Age, _spill it_? _Give it over_? _Tell us the truth this time, or we wreck you_?”

“How about _go away_?”

“What’s that word Romanoff’s always using? Salty? So _salty_ , Rogers.”

Steve rolls his eyes. “We have to find you a hobby.”

“I have a hobby. It’s called being charming. Anyway, like I said. Actual worst liar in the world award goes to you, you object, I am witty again (as per usual) and then you finally spill the beans—spill the beans! They said that in the Paleolithic Era, yeah?”

Sometimes he really has to remind himself that he enjoys spending time with Tony Stark. “Dammit, Tony—”

“ _Language_ , Captain, what will the children think—”

“—what the hell makes you think I would know?”

He never, ever wants to be on the receiving end of a pitying look from Tony Stark ever again. “My brain can’t decide if I want to laugh or cry. You cannot _possibly_ be that stupid.”

“Watch it.”

Tony stares at him like he’s a funny zoo exhibit, all goggling eyes and open mouth. “You _are._ ”

“Are what?”

“Oh my _god_.” Tony fists his hands in his hair, looking for all the world like a escaped sanitarium patient. “You are _actually that oblivious._ ”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“I have to tell Pepper—”

“ _Stark_ ,” Steve snaps. “Tell Pepper what?”

But Tony’s vanished, like he’s teleported. Steve pinches the bridge of his nose and lets out a long breath. _Tony Stark is a good man_ , he tells himself. _Tony Stark is a brilliant human being. Tony Stark is also completely batshit insane._

“Headache?” Hill says from nearby. His eyes catch her earrings, resting like stars against her throat. She wears high-necked gowns to hide her soulmark—that’s what he supposes, anyway—but while this one wraps close around her neck, it leaves her back almost entirely bare. She looks—he can’t think of the word, at first. She looks _touchable_ , which is near to impossibility. Maria Hill is about as remote and unwavering as an iceberg. She’s not supposed to be touchable.

( _Captain’s orders,_ she’d told Sam. And on comms, when he’d told her to shoot the helicarrier down, she’d sounded like he’d ripped something out of her, like she wanted to scream at him, but there was something else there, too, and she hasn’t called him Steve since but in that moment he could have sworn—)

“Rogers.” She cocks an eyebrow. “You’re staring. Do I have something on my face?”

“Uh.” He looks down into his drink again. “No, just—I was thinking. Is it a headache if it’s constant?”

“Tony?”

“Tony.”

Hill hums. Then she takes a place next to him against the wall, locking her hands behind her back. He wants to touch his fingertips to the dip beneath her jaw, to the vertebra of her spine.

“What did he want to know?” Hill asks. “Tony, I mean.”

He nearly doesn’t say anything. There’s something creeping along the skin of his back, like ants, prickling, hyperaware. _You cannot possibly be that stupid_ , Tony had said, and the look on her face when she’d been talking to Sam on the plane, when they’d thought he’d been asleep, they smash together in his head, words and images, and he risks it. He’s never not been good at risking everything. “He was asking about you, actually.”

She blinks once. Her eyelashes are very long and dark. “About me?”

“He said something about how you’ve changed, lately. I don’t know.”

Hill’s brows clench together. “What’s that even supposed to mean?”

“He said—” He hesitates. “Just that you seem happier now, that’s all.”

(So maybe he’s a coward, too.)

“Happier,” she repeats, and then rolls her eyes to the ceiling, like she’s begging for patience. “Please remind me that that man pays my bills and that I should not call him crazy to his face.”

“You already call him crazy to his face.”

She blows air through her nose. “Regardless.”

“He pays your bills, don’t even start.” He sighs. “How did the Romania mission go? With Sam.”

“All right. As well as it can go without any sign of him.” Hill tips her head back against the wall, and the long pale line of her throat is astoundingly distracting. “This soul mate of yours is very, very good at hiding when he wants to.” She flicks a look at him through her lashes. “What about you?”

“What about me?”

The look she gives him then says _don’t you bullshit me_ better than anyone else in this room ever could. “I know you wanted to go.”

Steve watches Rhodey settle in among civvies, watches Thor and Tony go back to their argument. “Nat asked me to help with Strucker. And I thought, maybe, if it was HYDRA—”

“—that Barnes might be there too.” The mark starts to sting again. Hill rubs her fingertips over her collarbone, absentmindedly. “No sign of him in Romania, no sign of him in Sokovia.” She pauses. “I might punch him for leading us on a chase this long.”

Steve chokes on his swallow of beer. It takes a second or two before he can breathe again. “I’d pay to see that.”

“Whole bills or gold bullion only.” She narrows her eyes at Lewis, at Val de Fontaine inserting herself into Tony and Thor’s bickering. “I should—probably go deal with that.”

“Hill,” Steve says, and reaches out. He means to touch her shoulder, but she moves at just the wrong moment, and his fingertips brush over her throat instead, at the skin just beyond the cloth hiding her mark. She freezes, and her eyes widen, just a little, just enough. He ought to pull back, really. But he doesn’t.

“I asked you to go in my place because I knew that if you found him, you’d do anything to keep him around until I could get there,” he says. “I know—Sam would do it too, I knew that, but—but no matter how much I wanted to be there, I knew I could trust you to—to help him. I knew I could leave him to you. And that you’d keep him safe.”

The mark stings against his ribcage. Hill doesn’t move. She just watches him, unblinking, and when she lifts a hand it’s not to touch him, but to brush two fingers over the cloth covering her mark. Like it’s aching. “Oh,” she says, and this voice—he’s never heard that sort of voice out of her before. “I—oh.”

Something catches between them, strung taut. Hill swallows—he can see her do it, she’s still standing so close. “Rogers,” she says, and then stops. She swallows again. “Steve, I don’t—”

There’s a tremendous crash, the sound of shattering glass. Steve yanks his hand back from Hill, and curls his fingers into a fist as Val de Fontaine looks down at the wreckage of the tray of champagne glasses, her eyebrows clambering up into her pixie cut.

“Oops.” She waves at Tony. “I’ll buy new ones.”

When he looks back, Hill has vanished.

.

.

.

“There’s only one path to peace,” Ultron says, and her heart is pounding, because somehow she knows, somehow she _knows_ what it’s going to say before it speaks, because _you want to protect the world, but you don’t want it to change—_ “The Avengers’ extinction.”

When it’s over she doesn’t look away from Steve Rogers. Ultron is a robot—Ultron is a _monster_ , Ultron is a murderous computer program with insane daddy issues—but Ultron also makes more sense than she wants to admit, because if there’s one thing she’s always wanted everyone to understand, it’s that _there are no strings on me_ —

— _but you can’t ask me to sign your death warrant, not when—_

— _not when_ —

— _I knew,_ he’d said, _I knew I could leave him to you_ , when this is his soul mate, a soul mate he’d thought was dead, and _Jesus Christ, why does he trust me that much_ —

— _whatever control or influence or power you’re frightened of Steve having over you, you’ll have just as much of it over—_

—rainwater dripping from his hair onto her shoulder and the damp places he’d left behind on her clothes—

It’s only once they’re all gone, to rest or to change or to rage, that she presses her back against the wall, slides down to sit on the floor. Maria sets both hands over her mouth. She hasn’t melted down like this since the bathroom in the Ypsilanti hospital, when she’d walked in and seen her mother and the tubes and the wires and everything she never, ever wants to remember. There’s no JARVIS left to tell on her, though, so she covers her mouth and tries very hard to breathe.

 _—he will give you all of himself_ —

Fate can’t catch her with its strings because fate doesn’t exist, soulmarks don’t mean anything, but at the same time she feels like she’s going to shatter because of everything that’s tangled up inside her, and maybe—

— _I knew I could leave him to you_ —

—there are no strings of fate, there is no destiny, there is only this, the agony of it, the terror and the overwhelming truth of it, that maybe—

— _you’re a colleague and a friend, and you shouldn’t be alone_ —

—maybe Pepper was right about Steve, about him giving her everything, because it really, really feels like—

— _I’d still want you at my back—_

—he already has.

“Holy shit.” She closes her eyes, breathes. “Holy shit.”

She can still feel his fingertips against the side of her throat.

.

.

.

Wakanda is a constant thorn in his soulmark and visions in his head, dreams and vague realities. Bucky is there, and Peggy, but Hill is too, and there’s something wrong in that image that he can’t quite work out—

“The War’s over, Steve! We can go home!”

_—if you could hang up your shield, would you?_

.

.

.

It’s the twins, Lewis’s Twins, and the sound Darcy Lewis makes when Pietro Maximoff is hit is something she never, ever wants to hear again, but she’s already heard it, hasn’t she, she’s heard it in herself when she hit that goddamn button—

— _but, Steve—_

.

.

.

Wanda Maximoff looks too young to have done everything she’s done, but then again, he’s not exactly the best person to judge someone’s deeds by their age.

“You’re free to wander around the medical wing, but not beyond that unless you’re accompanied by your caretaker.” She doesn’t seem to be listening. Steve doesn’t blame her. He’s been awake for four days straight at this point, he still feels as though he’s being pummeled by robots (bastards packed a punch, he’ll give Stark that much), and he’s talking to a girl who can apparently read people’s minds, so he’s not really sure there’s any point in speaking anyway. “According to Dr. Cho, your brother should start showing improvement in a couple of days. Both of you have accelerated healing factors?”

She stirs, her hair slipping over her shoulder, tangled and dirty. “Mine is—not like his.”

“Then he can mess with you about your bruises.”

Wanda’s brow wrinkles. “Mess with?”

“Tease.”

“Oh.” She glances at him sidelong, and she looks nothing like Maria Hill, but for a moment their expressions could be identical. “Why—you are not angry. With me.”

“You changed sides, did the right thing. I’m still pissed you messed around with my head, but I’m not mad at you for doing what you thought would get you justice.” He cocks his head. “Did you think I wouldn’t be?”

Her mouth curls downward. “You confuse me. You do not—why?”

Steve rubs a thumb over the tarnished silver band around his wrist. _This girl is Lewis’s silver,_ he thinks. _Her and her brother._ And he thinks he can catch a gleam of it through her hair, winding around the base of her neck. “I’d be a hypocrite if I couldn’t forgive someone for winding up on the wrong side through no fault of their own.”

Wanda studies him. For a second, he thinks he feels a clattering in the back of his head. Then it’s gone, and she looks away.

“None of you make sense.”

Steve shrugs. “I don’t think we’re supposed to.”

He’s not surprised to find Lewis curled into a chair by Maximoff’s hospital bed. She’s talking, her voice low, but when they come into sight of her—the expression on Wanda’s face is one that Steve knows as well as he knows his heartbeat, because he can remember seeing that look on Bucky’s face, on Peggy’s, that sudden shock, the wonder of it. _This person is my soul mate._ Wanda digs her fingernails hard into the door frame, and she doesn’t seem to realize Steve is still standing here. She looks desperate, almost hungry, and it’s so raw and powerful that he has to look away.

_Did I look like that with them?_

And then: _do I look like that with her?_

— _Rogers—Steve, I don’t—_

—the catch in her breathing over the commlink and _but, Steve_ —

“Hey, Cap.” Lewis snaps him a silly little salute, and he doesn’t have the heart to tell her she’s doing it wrong. “Didn’t mean to get mushy on your old fashioned notions.”

“Shut up, Lewis,” he says, and escapes as soon as he can manage it.

He asks the first lab tech he sees where he can find Director Hill, and though the kid blinks at the title (he blinks a _lot_ at the title, because apparently nobody’s figured out yet that that’s what she’s always been) he gives him directions to an office on the east side of the building, where you can see the moon rise through the window and the door is made of heavy oak.

— _if you could hang up your shield_ —

Her hair is damp like she’s showered, knotted tight at the back of her head, and she’s back in her SHIELD uniform. The familiarity of it makes everything ache. When he knocks on the door, she jerks to attention, one hand dropping to her side in an automatic search for a weapon. Then she relaxes and tenses all at once, her eyes fixing on his face and staying there.

“Rogers.”

Steve takes a breath. “I can’t hang up the shield,” he says. Her eyebrows arch. “I don’t think I’d ever be able to hang up the shield. The sort of person who could have managed it, he died, seventy-five years ago. He died in a plane crash. And—and the person I am now, I wouldn’t be able to give it up. I need a war, Maria,” he says, and she takes a sharp breath like he’s struck her, and the mark is pounding in time with his heartbeat. “I’m always going to need a war. Like you.”

Maria closes her eyes, just for a moment. She rests her fingers to the desktop. “Yes. Like me.”

“Are you going to stay here? Only—I know you’re still working for Stark, but if—I want you to stay. If you want to. If you don’t, then—then that’s fine, but if—”

“This is _mine_.” She raps the desktop. “This is my fight as much as yours. The Avengers are mine. Fury left them with me. If you think you’re going to do what you do without me, you’re dead wrong.”

He just stands there and absorbs it for a while. _Captain’s orders,_ she’d said, but he doesn’t think she knows that the reverse is also true. _Director’s orders._

“I know you don’t want me as a soul mate.” She actually flinches this time, shaking her head once. He can’t stop, though. “I know that, I know you don’t want me as your silver, I know we talked about it and decided that it didn’t matter, that we didn’t need it, and if you still feel that way then I’ll never say a word about this, not ever again, but I think—if any part of you has changed your mind, even the smallest part, Maria, please, just—please tell me. I want—you don’t have to give me anything, but I—”

He thinks, then, that she’ll throw him out, but she doesn’t. She looks down at the top of her desk. “You shouldn’t want to give me that,” she says, and his heart stops. “The—you’re giving me _everything_ if you give me that. You shouldn’t want to do that. That’s—if you do that you’re giving up yourself.”

And is that what it is? The world seems to reorient itself on a different axis. He’s never seen Maria Hill frightened, but now—he steps into her space before he realizes what he’s doing, but instead of fleeing she stands her ground, and _that’s_ Maria Hill, that’s his third silver, third but not least, not in the slightest. “No.” Steve touches his forefinger to her cheekbone, thinking of breakability, of choice, and she doesn’t flinch.  “No, if—I’m not giving myself _up_ , Maria. I’m giving myself _to_ you. It’s not abandonment. It’s trust.”

She holds her breath, looking at him. When she rests her palm to his cheek, Steve’s the one that’s shaking.

“I could break you in a heartbeat if I wanted to.” She sounds—she sounds almost in awe. “If you give me that.”

“Yeah.”

She raises her other hand, touches his jaw. “And you’re not frightened of that at all, are you?”

“I think I’d have to be pretty damn stupid not to be frightened.” His voice cracks. “But—but it’s you. I can’t be frightened if it’s you. Because I trust you with everything. I trust you with _more_ than everything—with—with every part of me, and with them. All of it. I trust you with all of it. So I can’t be frightened if it’s you.”

He has this sense that something in the back of his head is cracking, crumbling. Like Wanda’s puttering around inside, but different. Maria’s breath catches when he touches his hand to her hip, but she doesn’t yank back.

“So—” His tongue sticks, and he has to swallow. “So the question is, do you trust me?”

His mark is blazing underneath his skin, hotter and hotter, and he can’t believe that it ever felt cool to the touch, can’t believe that it was ever chilly at all, not when she’s looking at him like the world is going to eat her alive and she’s almost willing to let it if it means staying here, in this moment—

“You’re a crazy son of a bitch, Cap,” she says, and he’s not certain if he bends into her or she leans up but then her mouth is touching his, and it’s like atoms colliding, like a nuclear reaction. She’s almost shy in the way she kisses him, but when she drops her hands to his chest her nails dig in like she’s trying to pin him there, and the contrast is all Hill. There’s a wild prickling feeling racing from his scalp to the soles of his feet, a sensation like cracking out of an eggshell, and then there’s _everything_ that is Maria Hill rushing through his head, taste and thought and sound and smell, the feel of cloth under her palms, and she breaks away from him in the shock of it.

“You’re in my head,” she says, and it’s almost like an echo on a telephone. He feels it in the back of his head before she says it, a thought before reality.

“You’re in _my_ head,” he says, and there’s a tingling in his throat that’s almost like tears. Maria— _Maria Roberta Hill, and her parents thought she was going to be a boy, there’s a man in her office and he’s looking at her like she’s a miracle when he’s the one who lived frozen for seventy-five years, and he can feel the way she trusts him the same way she can feel the way he’s breathless watching her, waiting, and she’s fucking terrified he’ll die on her, so completely unhinged by the idea that she’s giving him everything, but she’s not sure she can breathe without him anyway, and it's sick but she doesn't want it to change, because really if there's anyone in the world that she could trust enough to hurt her it's Steve goddamn Rogers—_ laughs, startled, and it’s not a snort or a choke but an actual _laugh_. She hooks her fingernails into his shirt again.

“You’re _in my head_ ,” she says again, and Steve touches her jaw with two fingers. He’s not sure he can speak, right now. He doesn’t even really have to, because _I love you_ and _I trust you more than anyone alive_ and _please God don’t let me lose her too_ are all thrumming in his marrow, and _I can’t believe this is happening_ and _this feeling might just kill me_ and _I didn’t choose to have a soul mate but I’ve already decided you’re the one thing I’m not ever going to lose_ is thrumming back at him from hers, and there’s nothing more to say.

.

.

.

“I knew it,” Nat says when she sees them next, and Maria has to bite her tongue to keep from sighing.

“Knew what?” says Clint.

“Stark owes me money,” says Lewis, and when Maria makes a noise like a tea kettle, she ducks her head. “Sorry, Boss, but it’s true.”

“All of you are dead to me,” says Steve.

“I’m very lost,” says Wanda Maximoff, and the Vision inclines his head once in androidish agreement.

From his wheelchair, Pietro says something in Sokovian that roughly translates to  _we're living in a circus_ , and rolls away in disgust. _  
_

.

.

.

He can feel how amused she is, but he can't find anything particularly funny about it. “You’re _Fury’s gold_?”

“We’re platonic, yes.” She just looks at him. “Bothered, Rogers?”

He rolls his eyes to the ceiling, begging someone for patience. “I think something in me just died a little bit,” he says, and Maria snorts and knocks into him with her shoulder. Before she can pull away, he knots his fingers into hers behind her back. She always jolts when he touches her, like she’s stuck her finger into an electrical socket.

“If you tell anyone, he’ll kill you.”

“Duly noted.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> As always, my Tumblr is shu-of-the-wind. Hit me up.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [you can't wake up (this is not a dream)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6243268) by [CMDRHill (JaneGlen)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/JaneGlen/pseuds/CMDRHill)




End file.
